


Watch the green field growing for reaping folk and sowing

by lotesse



Series: Wherein was bound a child [3]
Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Genre: 69 (Sex Position), Arthurian, British History, Cooking, Costume Parties & Masquerades, Established Relationship, Family Dynamics, Farmcore, Farmhouse of Love, Hate Crimes, Healing, Local Politics, M/M, Rimming, Rivers, Sick Character, Social Issues, Tree Magic, Wild Hunt, magic compatibility problems, mentoring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2020-09-14 10:49:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20273551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: They dropped the little saplings into the earth, tucking mulch up into mounds around them. “Crab-apple will be over there,” Bran said, gesturing, holding his map, “and pears go on the south side.”“Not a very standard orchard,” the boy said, sounding curious.“No more I mean it to be,” Bran answered.





	1. Chapter 1

“Oh, Bran, Bran, I'm going to – oh – _oh_ –”

After a moment, Bran pulled his head out from under the quilt, a taste of salt in his mouth and a smile on his lips as he looked up at his boyfriend. Will was flushed and fetching against the pillows in the afterglow of orgasm, the pink light of early morning painting the whole scene with a luminous glow.

“Good?” Bran asked, his voice husking more than he'd expected when he'd started to speak.

“Always,” Will said. “Are you sure you have to work today? You can't, say, stay here in bed with me for the next twelve hours or so instead?”

“But I do have to work today,” Bran said with a groan, raising himself up on his forearms and then rolling to his feet. “I've got all of my bare-root plantings ready to go, once I do some delving; and not a moment too soon, with how late it's getting in the autumn. Come on, Stanton, agriculture waits for no man. Are you going to pitch in, or do you have other business to see to?”

“As it happens, I have a meeting to keep. Not until later, though I should get on some other things this morning.” Bran leered at him, and Will swatted at his ankles ineffectually. “Gwen thinks she's found me an intern, and I've promised to meet the kid this afternoon after she gets out of school.”

“Are you having her up to the manor?”

“That's the plan.”

“Dinner there, then? And we can decide after that about where to sleep.”

After Bran had come to live in Huntercombe the previous summer, they had tried to keep up the pretense, to themselves as well as to their friends and family, that they were going to be living separately, and only sleeping together sometimes on date nights. That hadn't lasted long. Instead, after a few weeks they had fallen into an easy habit of bouncing back and forth between households, from the farmhouse to the manor, sometimes separated for a while but almost always reuniting for the night. For the general public of the village, their respective professional attachments made it easy to maintain the polite fiction that they were not sharing a residence when, as a matter of fact, they were effectively sharing two.

“I'll make a curry, if you like,” Will offered. He wasn't as good a cook as his sister Gwen, whose bakery had become a local favorite for both sweet and savory dishes since she'd opened it in what had been the village's old smithy a few years before, but he could make a decent curry, long-simmering sauces and spices being his strong point. Recipes that required careful timing or prompt action, on the other hand …

“Sure,” Bran said, pulling on thick woolen socks against the morning dew, and then digging for his reinforced corduroys. “Your mother will be here in half and hour – she's bringing _me_ a new helper today.”

“Really? Who?” Will asked, still lingering in the warm nest of their bed.

“Phil Roberts,” Bran said, jaw tightening. “Apparently it's a condition of his probation for the vandalism of the property. I'm not thrilled about it, but I'll take the free labor, I suppose. Your mum's agreed to handle most of the paperwork and interactions with the parents, knowing as she does so much more about the context, so at least I'm spared that mess.”

“I understand why you might have mixed feelings,” Will murmured. “All the same, don't be too hard on him. He's just a boy.”

“So too were we all, once.” Only, Bran realized, after he'd said it, it wasn't strictly true – Will, at least, hadn't ever really been a boy at all. Always underneath had been an Old One, first in waiting, then in secrecy. Still. The sentiment was true enough for general principles. 

“I love you,” Will said. “You're doing a good thing, even if you don't succeed in saving this one's soul. Remember that.” He swung down his legs and stood, then, crossing the room to where Bran was dressing. Will himself was only wearing an oversized and ancient white t-shirt, and it slipped charmingly away from his shoulders as Bran grabbed and kissed him as soon as he came within reach.

“I have to go get breakfast,” he said after a moment. “Unless you want her to catch us like this?”

Will smiled crookedly at him. “Don't tempt me.”

Bran tangled a hand in Will's longish brown hair, giving it a little tug. “Later,” he promised, and then let go of the soft handful and, reluctantly, made himself head off down the stairs. 

He went to fill and flip on the electric kettle before letting the dog out of his crate and filling his dish with kibble. Bercelet the wolfhound had come to him from an animal rescue, still in the strong flush of canine youth, and beginning to feel his freedom. If there was a problem member of the household, it was he, and all the more so when he was ready for his breakfast.

Bran turned next to the matter of his own breakfast, lighting the stovetop and heating a skillet of eggs with potatoes, onions, bacon, and cheese. He thought about adding extra for Will, but later was glad he had not. Will, neatly brushed and buttoned into his customary long-sleeved shirt, a knitted vest over the top in acknowledgement of the cool autumn morning, came down just as the kettle clicked off and Alice Stanton knocked at the front door. Will poured hot water into his travel mug and made his escape with alacrity – “I'll eat at the manor, I promise,” – leaving Bran to deal with his employer-cum-mother-in-law, and his new “assistant.” 

The Roberts boy was an unprepossessing youngster, sullen and spotty. Bran wasn't going to let him anywhere near the animals, not until he knew a deal more about his character, but there was plenty to do on the land. He left the sheep and goats in the barnyard, not bringing them out to the lightly-fenced grazing patch he'd had them clearing and enriching. In the barn itself, Mrs. Stanton's rabbits had found an expanded habitat, freeing up space at the Stanton house for Mr. Stanton to set up a little workshop; and the elderly gelding that had come with the somewhat awkward, in his new context, name of “Sweet William,” was stabled on the far side. 

While Bran wolfed down his food before it could get cold, Mrs. Stanton helped Phil retrieve the equipment they'd need for day from the barn's interior, as well as the variety of bare-root plants she and Bran had left wet-wrapped the day before, and lug the lot of it out into the back field.

“Have fun, you two,” she said, coming back to the barnyard with the boy. “Bran, his parents will pick him up at five.”

“Feed the animals on your way out?” Bran asked her, and she nodded in the affirmative. “And let the chickens out into the yard? Thanks.”

“So,” he said, turning back to his helper, “We're planting hedges and boundary trees today. You're going to dig; holes for the saplings, trenches for the hedges.”

Phil trailed him back out to the field. Handing the boy a spade, Bran scuffed at the earth in the old field with a boot-tip, leaving marks. “Dig here, here, here, here and here,” he instructed. “I'm going to lay guide strings for the hedges, so you'll know where to trench – but that won't be nearly as much work, it's just scooping out a little line. The saplings will need a few feet of depth. You go ahead and get started, and I'll come back around to you when I've more laid.”

The boy worked in silence for a while, as the sun rose higher and Bran laid out the little strings that would mark his hedges someday, referring back to his master map as he went.

After a time, Phil called, “Hey. I've dug all the spots you marked.”

Bran climbed back to his feet from kneeling, dusting his hands against his thighs. “All right,” he said. “There's more to dig, but let's plant this row first. I want to keep close track of where everything is. No surprises! The five apples go in a row here, alphabetical by variety, so they can cross-pollinate.”

They dropped the little saplings into the earth, tucking mulch up into mounds around them.

“Crab-apple will be over there,” Bran said, gesturing, holding his map, “and pears go on the south side.”

“Not a very standard orchard,” the boy said, sounding curious.

“No more I mean it to be,” Bran answered. “Come on, we need to trench and lay down bone meal for the hawthorn hedges, now that I've got them marked. I'll position the rest of the trees while you manage the trenching. You'll find the bone meal over by the rootlings there, when you're ready for it.”

Will had arrived at Huntercombe Manor while the morning was still quiet and new. He let himself into the old house, breathing a happy sigh. He'd come to care about it deeply, this last homestead of the Old Ones in England. Since Bran had called him back to himself, he'd become increasingly aware of his responsibility to the trust and its holdings, both as the last of the Old Ones, and as the steward of an old aristocratic wealth in a rapidly modernizing world.

Leaving his hat on its peg in the front hall, Will headed back to the little library, which he also habitually used as an office, and where his books and papers were kept. His task for the day was to look over the books and get things in order for the coming Christmas season, when he would have many opportunities, both to serve the local community and, if he so chose, to turn a profit. He was trying to do more of the former, and so occasionally needed to engage in the latter. 

He was too likely, he knew well, to become withdrawn from the world of men. He meant to remedy it, if only for Bran's sake.

This would be his first Christmas with Bran – the year before didn't really count, he'd been barely coherent, so terribly weak after the wasting season he'd spent held captive beneath the cold river's water – and he wanted it to be something special. 

Once upon a time, he remembered, a Huntercombe Christmas had meant a gathering of the most brilliant, wise, powerful, and good – although not, consistently, the most wealthy, beautiful, notable, or stylish. Old Ones, while always remarkable, tended to find lives where they were not over-much remarked upon. The Old Ones would come together here at the manor during the Christmas season to re-connect, and to periodically enact the ritual renewal of the Sign of Wood. Coming together, they were an assembly reaching across continents of space, centuries of human time. Will had been a part of those celebrations, albeit paradoxically, attending parties that had happened hundreds of years before he had been born into Huntercombe village, and begun coming to the manor house for the traditional local Christmas festivities with his family.

He was back at it after a brief break for lunch; he'd need to get Stephen, as co-trustee, to sign off on anything he proposed, and that meant he had to be organized early, ready and able to communicate his aims to his big brother in the tidy, concrete language of business.

Even with the persistent presence of the ticking clock beside him, which ought to have kept him cognizant of the hour, Gwen's knock on the exterior door gave him a start; he'd drifted again into memories of Christmases past, happily recalling the feeling of belongingess he'd had while surrounded by his own inhuman Circle. Re-settling his nerves, Will brought himself back to the current moment, and rose to admit his mortal sister, who was closely followed as she came in by a girl with big dark eyes, a stubborn mouth, and a headscarf covering her hair and ears.

“Hi Will,” Gwen said. “This is Aalia. Aalia, my brother Will. She's been coming around the bakery after school, says she's trying to avoid the other kids. She likes history and spends a lot of time in the school library, so when we had a chat about it we thought she might fit in well here with you.”

“Hello, Aalia,” Will said gently, shutting his account books and pushing his chair back to rise and shake her proffered hand. “Have you had a chance to come to this house before?”

“No,” the girl said, eyes still wide.

“There are a few things you could help with, if you're interested,” Will said. “For one thing – it's not glamorous, but all of the books and other things need to be dusted pretty regularly. When the manor is open to guests, I hire in a cleaning service, but it would help if I had someone who could take the time to wipe things down more regularly. There are also a lot of little clerical chores that go into running the trust, and if you're interested, I can show you those as they come up, and see what you're best suited to there. Do you have any particular historical interests, in terms of period, subject, or location?”

“I like neolithic history,” Aalia said. “I want to know more about how the whole world was still connected, even thousands of years ago.”

“A very interesting subject matter,” Will commended. “Our focus here at the manor is a little later, early Victorian period for the most part, but of course the one flows into the other. You'd be amazed at how much the earliest trade patterns of the British Isles, from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age and onward, are replicated in our contemporary geopolitics, for one thing.”

“All right, baby brother, you needn't talk her ear off,” Gwen cut in. “Do you want her to stay for a while today, and can you take her back to her house for supper? I can take her now, if not.”

“If you want to stay here for a while, Aalia, you're welcome,” Will said. “I don't have a car, but I'll walk you home. If you'd rather go with Gwen now, and come back some other time, that's fine, too. I want you to know that an internship with the trust will absolutely be a paid job – just the minimum wage, as you're young, yet, and not too many hours. And I'll need a signature from your parent or guardian, before I can really get you started. You're not of age, are you? No, I didn't think so. I'll clock any hours you do today, or while you're training, and put them toward your first proper paycheque.”

“You don't have to pay me,” the girl said. “Only give me a place they can't find me, and I won't need anything else.”

“Nonsense,” Will said. “A brilliant, driven young lady like you is going places, and when you get there you'll need funds. We'll get your resume started, give you some good marketable skills, and give you a bit of independence, and you'll be off like a rocket. Don't say you don't deserve the pay; live up to the challenge.”

“Yes, all right,” Aalia acquiesced, sounding a little overwhelmed.

“Have fun, kiddo,” Gwen said. “I told you he wasn't like anybody else.” To Will, she added, “She lives in the estate on the south end of town. Call me if you run into any problems. I have to get back to work before my bread burns!” She made her exit, leaving Will and Aalia alone together.

“You have a lot of books on magic,” she observed.

“I do. The lady who used to live here had a famous collection, once upon a time, and I've tried to rebuild it in her honor. Also, I think it's interesting, what people believe in that they can't touch or see. If you'd like to stay and look at the books you can, but I need to make a detour to the kitchen and add the next round of ingredients to the curry I'm making.”

“I can help,” Aalia offered promptly. “I'm a good cook. I know how to make curry.”

“All right, thanks. Come along then. I'll give you the penny tour. Although – ” he added, blushing a little – “not the upstairs rooms. They're being cleaned.”

In the barn, Phil helped Bran clean and put away the tools they'd used that day. As they were finishing, Phil said, “That's a nice horse you've got there.”

“Yeah? He's a decent old chap. We're working on it.”

“Can't you ride?”

“A little, now. I couldn't at all before. But it's never too late to learn new skills. Give me another year or two, and I'll have the thing properly. He's a good beast, and he's patient with me as I do my learning. Do you like horses?”

“I do,” Phil admitted. “I used to beg my dad for one, when I was little. But he always said there were better things to do with money than throwing it down an animal's gullet.”

“Well,” Bran said, dusting his hands together to clean them, “I don't much agree with that. I figure, animals keep a person human; you're accountable to something weaker than yourself, that will help you, if you don't betray them. It's good practice for your conscience and sense of yourself as a part of a community. Don't you have any animals?”

“Mum has some fish,” Phil said. “Nothing otherwise. They like to go on holiday, my mum and dad, and they said a dog would just have to be kenneled all the time.”

“Well, that might be true,” Bran acceded. “Either way, you're a great growing lad; soon, you'll be able to make your own decisions on that score.” He added, “Can you ride?”

“A little,” Phil said. “I've an uncle who has horses, and he's let me ride them. They're real smart, horses. Smarter than some people.”

“I don't know about that,” Bran said. “Most people are plenty smart, if you're not judging them on narrow conditions or some such. You might do better to value your fellow human beings.”

“You can't tell me you like everybody,” Phil said. “Not looking like you do. Sorry,” he added belatedly.

“No, of course not,” Bran said, “not … looking like I do. Quite. But liking's not in it; compassion, empathy, those are what you need to get a feel for. You're not the only human being in an empty world; there's lots of us, all bumping around, doing our best, reaching for survival and, beyond that, some sense of happiness, fulfillment. Whatever you're thinking, feeling, no matter, you're not alone in it. This is a great good thing, Phil, but it also means you have to see the needs of others, as well as your own.”

“Don't think my dad would agree with you.”

“Likely he wouldn't. You'll have to decide what you think, though, for your own self, sooner or later. More hedging tomorrow,” he told Phil as they stood side by side, waiting for the Roberts adults to come and collect their kid for the night. “Bring your own work gloves, this time.”

The curry in the crock pot was aromatic and tempting as soon as Bran came in the great Huntercombe Manor door, his hands full of the dog's leash. After uncollaring and feeding Bercelet, he found Will in the kitchen frying rice, and took his chance to wrap his arms around his boyfriend's waist and kiss his neck, his ears, the bones and planes hidden under the collar of his shirt. 

“Hallo beautiful,” he said, after he'd left a red mark at the top of Will's shoulder.

“Hi,” Will said, turning to him with a happy grin. “Good day?”

“Surprisingly, yes. Got a lot done. The Roberts kid isn't near as bad as I'd expected, given what he did last spring.”

“That family's quite conservative, aren't they? I wonder what his home life is like.”

Bran gathered salt, pepper, oil, and vinegar, taking them to the table and setting dishes and cutlery for two. “He said a little … not much, not yet. But he wants to talk to someone, seems like.”

Will smiled. “I suppose that's why mother brought him round.” As they sat down, he added, “Equinox comes this weekend.”

“I should spend some time with Tamesis,” Bran reflected. “High holy day, and all. You're meant to visit your family on holidays, right?”

“Many do,” Will said. “Mostly, their families aren't river goddesses, but – yes.”

“Well, mine is. I take it you're not coming along?”

“If you need me to, I will. I think you'll get on better just the two of you, though, without me there as a reminder of old conflicts.”

Bran kissed him. “All right, love, you needn't come visit my terrifying aunt who held you hostage that one time, you're off the hook.”

“Speaking of, have you heard recently from your father, or any of the others in Wales?”

“Letter came yesterday. I gather they're having a good year at Clwyd, or at least good enough. Da has a sheepdog puppy he is training up for me, if I can figure out how to get her here, to keep Bercelet company.”

“Tell Rhys to come see us at Christmas, when Stephen is visiting, and he can get in a meet-up and bring the dog with,” Will suggested.

“Do he and Stephen know each other, then?”

“They're closer in age to each other than they are to me,” Will answered. “Of course, they're _all_ older than me.”

“In the one way only.”

“In the only way that matters, given the context. Are you working on the farm again tomorrow? Should we head back that way before bed?”

“Yes, probably. You haven't told me anything about your new intern – I half expected I'd get to meet her.”

“I walked her home while the curry stewed.”

“What's she like?”

“A nice young lady, very bright,” Will said. “Active and perceptive mind.”

“Good. You could use a new friend or two. It'll be good for you to have the company, yeah?”

“I think it could be very nice.”

“If you've walked down to the village and back already, after walking here this morning, that's enough tramping about for you for the one day. Let's sleep here tonight.” Raising his hands to forestall the inevitable injection, Bran said, “I know you're better, I know you're a big tough Old One who doesn't need fussing over, but it doesn't matter that much. Give me the gift of sparing you, _dewin_.”

Will could refuse Bran nothing, not when he asked for it with that voice, his golden eyes gone soft and earnest, and so he nodded in helpless acceptance. They did the washing up together, working side by side in pleasant domesticity. When the kitchen was neatened, they retired to the library, where Bran liked to watch the evening news.

Will watched him watching it. As Bran slipped into a momentary slide of downward consciousness, he reached out to card his fingers through Bran's pale white-blond hair, soft and caressing. Bran's face was open and relaxed. He looked very young; younger, in a way, than he had as a child, when Will had first known him, when he had been pinched with arrogance and insecurity.

After a few seconds, Bran pulled back to waking with a visible effort. “Another good reason to sleep in my bed, tonight,” Will said softly. “You've been working awfully hard, Bran. Spare yourself, sometimes, too, for the sake of those of us that love you.”

“Yes, well,” Bran drawled back, yawning, “The frost is going to come when it comes, and whatever I've got done, there it'll stand. Have to work when the time is ripe, the iron is hot. Things will quiet down soon enough.”

They'd moved one of the double beds from the guest rooms upstairs down into Will's suite, to give them a little more breathing room when they chose to stay over. After a celebratory night in July, shortly after Bran had relocated, they hadn't stayed again in the master chamber. Will supposed it was a bit fine for everyday wear.

The bed was only the most visible of the ways that Bran's presence had transformed the rooms. 

Bercelet was curled up on a rag rug by the window, his usual place to sleep. 

Bran himself stumbled through his bedtime preparations, then stretched out on top of the coverlet, overcome again by tiredness before he'd made it properly to his pillow. He looked impossibly attractive lying there, his pale coloring contrasting dramatically will the darker tones of the bedding. Will couldn't think, sometimes, what he'd ever done in his long, labyrinthine life to deserve so sweet a love.

He put out the light, then went to the bed, teasing back the covers. When he lay down he tugged Bran close, pulling him up to spoon in his arms. He kicked the blanket back over them, and let himself become lost in the scent of Bran's body, the sense of home that he experienced in his company, until he too fell asleep.


	2. Chapter 2

On Saturday morning, Bran went to visit his aunt.

The way he did this was to stroll down from the village to the river, and then stand about on the bank until she could be bothered to turn up. He'd found that it was a good idea to bring a book, account, or some other small project to keep himself occupied with, as there was almost always a wait. That morning, noting the sunny, cloudless skies, he'd also brought his dark glasses and a billed cap to protect his sensitive eyes from the sparkle of the light on the water.

He was deep into a chapter on topsoil chemistry and nitrogenization when up she came, the genius Tamesis, bubbling up green and silver through the stream to sit, barefoot and dripping, on the bank beside him.

“Good morning, sister-son,” she said, giving him a smile that was too full of gleaming, pearly teeth.

“Good morning, Aunt Tamesis,” he answered her. “You're looking well.”

“A lovely equinox celebration we had last night, just glorious. The land is in such good spirits, having you here. I'm very pleased.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” Bran said. “I'm rather counting on the land, you know.”

“You shouldn't worry,” she told him. “It doesn't become you. Of course the land won't let you down. I thought you knew who you were!”

“I do,” he protested. “It's still new to me, that's all. I don't know all the rules yet. I don't know how things work.”

“That's not the problem at all.” She dismissed him with an airy gesture, droplets of water flying from her fingers to shear sparkling through the light. “The problem is that your lack of self-confidence impedes your access to your power. You need to decide whether you want to eat, or be eaten, child of my lost sister Guenever. Don't forget that she let herself be eaten. And how is your young man?”

“He's well,” Bran answered, doing his best to handle the rapid swerves in her conversation. It was not at all difficult to remember that she was inhuman when you spoke to her, he'd come to learn. “Thanks.” 

He didn't want to eat _or_ be eaten, in any save a sexual sense, but he did not mention that to his aunt. He saved that tidbit for Will.

He found him still sleeping in his room at the manor. They slept together there, sometimes, as it seemed to give Will a deep sense of security. Bran swung a bared leg over Will's quiescent body, coming to sit on his half-hard cock. Leaning down to kiss Will's throat, he murmured, “Time to wake up, sleepy head. The river is high and the sun is up, as are portions of your anatomy; it's the equinox, and I love you.”

Will's sea-blue eyes blinked open, fringed by long, dark lashes. “Good morning,” he said, licking his lips and reaching up to touch Bran's hair and face, as he often did.

“So, wizard,” Bran said, grinning. “Do you want to eat, or be eaten?”

Will's lashes flickered once, twice, and then his face shifted into a wide, cat's-cream smile. “Alas, sire, how little imagination you show,” he said, voice gone rich and mock-courtly. “Can your philosophy not encompass both?” 

Bran took the hint, and Will's cock, pulling it into his mouth, tonguing it until it grew full and firm. He switched his position over Will's torso so that Will could likewise close his lips around Bran's rapidly hardening length. The first time they'd done this, they'd gone slow, pacing their breathing together so that no-one would choke or struggle. Now, the rhythm was right there when Bran reached for it, a current he could always pick up and let carry him, rapid and careless. The taste of Will's semen was as salt and bitter as seawater, stronger as Will got closer and closer to climax. The feel of Will's mouth around his cock was hot and tight and firm. 

Will stroked his base with a firm tongue, and then sucked hungrily at his tip, swallowing it down deep into his hot throat. When Bran came, Will swallowed that down, too, and then lasted surprisingly long himself before Bran managed to finally finish him off.

“Going for a distance record?” he asked, when he could get his tongue around the English language again, the tang of Will's orgasm still pungent in his senses.

“Only because you just woke me up. I love you. Now, shove over, I need the wc.”

Bran laughed and let him up, and then went to wash up and make breakfast. There were other kinds of eating that he was ready to be seeing to.

On Sunday morning, they joined the Stantons at the village church. The rector had remembered Bran from his midwinter visit the previous year, the first time he had accompanied the Stantons to the service after he'd relocated to Huntercombe for the job at Dawsons' farm, and had ensured that the church had embraced him warmly. 

It was not quite what Bran had been used to, but he had to admit the choir was very good. Will, once the star boy soprano, had been absent for more than a decade; but when Bran began going to practice, he happily went along, standing next to Bran in the bass section and gently singing the old hymns in a soft, round voice. It had proved to be a good way of getting to know the men of the village; older men, most of them, steady and knowledgable souls.

“I hear you've got the Roberts boy doing hard labor on the farm,” Roger Stanton said to Bran after the service.

“That's right. He's been okay so far. Just the two days so far, though, so we'll see.”

“It's good of you to show such patience and restraint with the little hooligan.”

“I get my land planted, I'm happy,” Bran answered with a shrug. “If it gives the kid a better target for his anger, that's all to the good, too. Digging some physical holes might make it easier for him not to dig himself into any more criminal ones. At least, that's the theory.”

“I appreciate your pragmatism, son,” Roger said, clapping his on the shoulders.

“A good deed is always its own reward,” the rector said, coming down the aisle to where they stood talking. “We should all be so involved with the struggling members of our community.”

“I'd like to get to know his father, Mr. Roberts, a little better,” Bran said.

“The Robertses have left already, but I believe he belongs to the Friendship Society.”

“Really,” Bran said.

“I believe they meet on Thursdays.”

“My friend Greg Macgregor is a member,” Roger offered. “I'll ask him about it, next time we get together to do a crossword. He's a fine puzzle-worker, is Greg.”

“Ta, I'd appreciate that,” Bran told him.

“And you, Will?” the rector asked. “You don't join in many clubs, do you? Will you go along with your friend?”

“Oh,” Will said, sounding as if he'd been startled out of an abstraction, “I don't know. Perhaps.”

“I'm glad he's got you back in the choir, at least,” Mrs. Stanton put in. “You boys used to do the prettiest singing, when you were all still at home.”

That night, the Wild Hunt came to find Bran at the farmhouse door. Will was puttering about the kitchen inside. He heard the call as clearly as Bran did. 

“I'm going out with them,” Bran said. “Will you be all right here? You can lock up, I've got my keys.”

“That's all right,” Will said, “I'll go home. Call me tomorrow, and we can put together plans for dinner. And – stay safe. Don't fall off that horse.”

“It was only the once, farm boy. We weren't all born astride great strapping draft horses, you know.”

“Sure, just with your hands all over your sheep! Farm boy yourself.”

“Bundle up, all right? It's late for you to be walking back to the manor. And take Bercelet. Go carefully. I love you.”

“I love you too. I'll finish up here, and lock the door before I go.”

Across the yard, the spectral white hounds were milling about the barn door, passing through it as if it was made of so much mist. It was a mercy the horse wasn't panicking and making a racket, with their presence so near to his stall. Bercelet, lingering by the door, had his ears back, his tail between his legs in distress and the strange scents and sounds.

Herne, appearing in his most human figure, stood in the yard. The horse wasn't in his stall, but stood beside the huntsman, who had the reins loosely wrapped around one hand. He must have saddled the beast himself, Bran thought, and goggled.

“How have you been getting on with him?” Herne asked.

“Well enough.”

“Fallen this week?”

“Not this week, no.”

“Well, well,” Herne said, almost humorous, “you'll succeed at riding Sweet William yet. A good name, have I said so before?”

“You have,” Bran grumbled.

“The only way to learn is to try, and fail, and try again. Even if you are afraid, don't show it; the animals will sense your fear. We ride,” Herne said. “You've skill enough to make the attempt. Come with us. We are in haste; that is why I have helped you prepare your horse. Otherwise, I would have made you do it, and watched you for any mistakes.” 

“Yes, I know,” Bran said, and swung himself up into the saddle. Herne himself shifted into a more animalistic morph, sprouting hooves and horns in a strange and sudden instant, and they were off.

Herne had proved an exhaustive teacher. There was much, Bran had found, to be learned from him. In the modern world where he'd grown up, Bran had somewhat scorned the high English art of hunting, seeing it as the province of supernumerary toffs who had nothing better to do than torment other living creatures. And there was that element in it, to be sure, present in the social strata of the day – but what Herne was teaching him was equal parts the ancient art of woodcraft and the psychology of power, a practice that felt very different from upper-class flash and flare and display. 

Sometimes power was for display; sometimes it was better to remain concealed and watch the prey from cover. Herne required him to consider the weight of the balance, the need for decision, for choice – in addition to expecting him to memorize the names of the trees of the forest, the fewmets of the prey, the calls of the hounds and the horn, the leather and brass elements of the horse's tack, the Latin and Old French words for the bones, tendons, muscles, and other parts of body, living or dying.

Too, Herne spoke to him of the political history of the land, teaching him to see in patterns of vegetation and clearing the shaping will of human settlement, and control, and ultimately wealth. All of the world was the wild, and atop the wilderness individual men and societies continually attempted to erect their apparatus of dominance, and always the wilderness resisted that dominance, as it was able.

That night he rode with the Wild Hunt over the hills and dales of Buckinghamshire. “We are not in pursuit of a target, in our riding tonight,” Herne told him. “The veil thins on the equinox, and sometimes things go awry … but that moment is passed, now, for this turn of the year. We patrol tonight merely to remind the world of our presence: to mark our territory and check for malefactors. It is a good night for you to practice your horsemanship.”

And so he set Bran to riding drills, putting him through the paces, pushing him to jump his horse over fallen logs and across streams.

Bran was going to be stiff and sore in the morning, of that much he was sure. And he had a meeting with Alice Stanton in the morning. Wouldn't that be embarrassing, when she was bound to assume … well. Some other night, she might have been correct to assume he'd be making himself sore in more enjoyable ways. But at least he'd stuck the saddle. No falls for him that night!

They rode from end to end of the village, and out into the woodlands beyond, Herne urging them on for speed as the hounds enjoyed the free fast run. At last they returned, coming down through Rook's Wood to circle about once more in the farmyard.

“The year will be growing darker, soon,” Herne told him as he dismounted and led Sweet William into the barn. The huntsman did not enter, but remained lurking in the doorway. “We will ride more and more often, through the autumn and the winter. Be prepared. Practice what you have learned.”

“I will,” Bran promised; and then Herne and his hounds vanished aloft, fleeting as browning leaves blowing from a branch. Bran was left alone to take himself into the farmhouse, grab a heating pad and a jar of salve, and retire to a weary, solitary, and aching bed. He hoped that Will and the wolfhound were resting better, over across the way where he'd sent them. He missed them; but he was just as glad to not be seen while he recovered from the night's labors. It was not the most elegant of postures he found himself propped up in, resting and stretching out the abused muscles of his hips and groin. Fewer witnesses meant less mocking, after all.

On Monday morning, Alice Stanton came around. They'd been holding bi-weekly management meetings to review progress and planning for the farm, a formalization of the productive series of chats they'd had over the summer as Bran had gotten started conceptualizing the space.

“So,” she said, “tell me about the planting you've been doing.”

Bran, every bit as stiff and sore and bow-legged as he'd feared, gingerly went out with her to the back field where he and Phil had been laboring over the last week.

“We're beginning with the boundary hedges,” Bran said. “That's the first key part, or so I understand from the Agroforestry Research Trust. The plan is to build up the layers of vegetation gradually, working in a few strata. The boundary hedges mark the water runoff and erosion slopes of the land, and they'll be the anchors we use to set in all the rest of it. Phil Roberts did a good job helping me with the trenching, for whatever that's worth.”

“It's worth a lot,” Alice said. “What are the next steps? How much more are you going to try to get done before the winter closes in?”

“Well,” Bran said, looking out over the lands of the farm, “the sheep and goats are well-set already to brush clearing for us. I'm moving their pen around as fast as I'm ready for new sectors to be stripped of brush and suchlike.

'We've put in the fruit trees. It'll be a few years before they're ready to bear, but they'll form the core of the food forest that we're going to plant here. The backbone of the canopy layer. We'll have to take care to keep the goats away from them, mind, until they get fully established. Eventually, they'll give us sheltered areas from wind and frost to use as microclimates for other plantings. It'll be at least a year or two before the effect develops.

'Now that I've got them in, the next layer to plant will be the under-storey. The goal of all of this, remember, is to create a self-maintaining edible ecosystem. Ideally, each of these layers is going to support all of the others, so that it's much less labor-intensive to maintain. The hardest work is now, when everything has to be planned and planted properly, so that it can tick along on its own later on.”

“What are you thinking of for the under-storey?” Alice asked, inspecting the generously spaced rows of young trees.

“We'll want to water those this afternoon,” Bran mentioned aside. “We'll be able to get edible yields from some of the under-storey plants next year, I think. Lovage, onion, wild garlic, wild strawberries. Also I mean to seed the whole thing generously with clover and vetches in the spring, to fix the nitrogen levels in the soil. We might build a few spirals for herbs to sell in the next year or two; I don't want to seed herbs more broadly until the ecosystem gets more established. Oregano and mints can be bossy bastards, and I want a more diversified crop than just aromatics!”

“That sounds sensible,” Alice agreed.

They headed back to the farmhouse kitchen, where they shed outer layers and acquired fresh teacups before diving into the paperwork portion of their parlay.

“So,” Bran summarized, “we've got a few potential sources of revenue coming. There'll be the lambs to sell in the spring, and if I can find a good butcher to partner with, we can charge a decent price for those. Also I am working on grants for heritage and permaculture planting; Will's said that he has some ideas, but we've been busy, and I haven't had time to sit down with him.”

“Yes, I see,” she said with a turning smile that could almost be characterized as a smirk – but the teasing in it was only pleasant, gentle, affectionate. 

When they had reviewed all the papers, she looked at him, her smile wearing more than a bit sad. “Give my boy my best when you see him, Bran, will you? You two didn't come to supper yesterday, and apart from church I've not seen him for a week.”

It was Bran's turn to grimace at that. “I'll do so,” he said. “We'll make plans for some evening soon, yes?”

“I'd like that,” she said. “I know you've both been working hard.”

“We have,” Bran said. “But the first roots are established, now.”


	3. Chapter 3

Sitting alone in the manor reading room at the end of a long, tedious day of paperwork, Will might not have heard Aalia's characteristically quiet footsteps as she came down the hallway – but it was impossible to remain unaware of Bran, who had escorted her in to retrieve him, and was taunting loudly as they approached: “Is he still buried back here mouldering? Come out, man, come out!”

Mary was down from Birmingham for a visit, and he and Bran were pledged to stop in at their parents' for supper that evening. Admittedly, they had been so pledged for weeks already – but Mary's presence had provided the added ounce of social pressure needed to pry him out of his habitual solitude, and the two of them out of the morasses of their respective labors. 

He hadn't forgotten the plan, really – he'd only become so absorbed in his work that he had not thought the afternoon had worn so late. 

“It's time for you to be getting home,” Will said to his assistant as she came into the reading room, ignoring his boyfriend where he stood, clearly visible through the open doorway, lounging up against the painted walls of the library and noisily tapping his foot, his hair gilded brightly by the low lamplight. To Aalia, Will added, “If you come back with us to my mum and dad's, I'm sure someone can give you a ride across town.”

“My father gave me money for the taxi today. He said, since you're paying me fairly, it's worth my having a safe way to get around, and the taxi will cost less for just me than it would to get another car. He said he didn't want me to keep walking home through the winter.”

“A good idea.” Will breathed a sigh of some relief; her wellbeing had been worrying him, with the evening closing in more darkly as the season turned. “Shall we ring them up now? Bran and I can wait and see you off.”

“Yes, thank you,” she said, and went out with him into the larger room.

“Will,” Bran said expansively, unfolding in a fluid gesture, his heavy wool coat swirling around him as he moved to clasp Will by the shoulders. His hands were strong, solid, commanding. “Feels like I haven't seen you in an age. Ready to go?”

“We need to call the taxi first,” Will said, “and then, yes, please. More than ready.” Somewhere other than my parents' house, he did not add, as to do so would have been cowardly, he knew, and quite beneath him. Still, he very much wanted to; the idea of a big Stanton-style family meal held much less appeal than one of their intimate farmhouse dinners. 

Even after Bran released him, Will was still hyper-aware of the warmth his hands had left behind.

It was a cool evening, the first tinges of the coming cold reaching out to tickle their noses. While Aalia made her call, Bran made sure that Will was warmly bundled up against the night. “I'm all right,” Will muttered defensively, but let Bran wrap his neck more thoroughly with his long wool scarf all the same. When Bran came so close into his personal space, using his slight height advantage to loom over him ever so slightly, Will found it very difficult to remain obdurate for long. Those piercing golden hawk's eyes could communicate volumes without any need for speech.

They stood waiting together, the three of them, on the front steps of the manor, watching for the taxi and looking out over the grounds. Bran had brought Bercelet, who was engaged in investigating the decorative hedges with singular animal interest.

“We should think of something better to do with the garden here, next spring,” Will said to Aalia. “Bran's work at the old Dawson farm has got me inspired. We could do a re-creation historic garden, Edwardian or Georgian or something in that range; but I also think we could put together something more unusual, and that might be worth some doing.”

“We could do a witch's garden,” Aalia said with adolescent enthusiasm. “Or a poisoner's garden. Something to go with the special collection in the library, yeah?”

“That could be pretty cool,” Bran agreed. “On the other hand, I'm sure the liability concerns with a poisoner's garden are a nightmare.”

“Let's look into the idea,” Will suggested. “Research will come first, before anything else. Figure out what the real project would be, and we can see about feasibility.”

The taxi came then, one of the village's chatty senior citizens driving, and they saw Aalia off safely toward her home and supper. Will locked up for the night and made his way down along Huntercombe Lane through the gathering dark, Bran at his side, and the jingling of the dog's collar tags followed along behind them.

When they reached the Stantons' home, the volume level inside the old vicarage was markedly louder than was usual anymore; Mary was a chatterbox, and the normally more taciturn Gwen, already there for several hours and well into a visiting humor, seemed to have picked it up from her like a contagion. 

Wincing a little under the onslaught, Will helped his father set the table while Mary and Gwen bounced about the kitchen plating the meal, Bran and Mrs. Stanton having escaped to the relative tranquility of the front room to look over some more of their own interminable sets of papers. 

Mary was talking animatedly about a costume party she'd been to through her office, “called a 'How to Host A Murder' game. The whole thing comes out of a kit, so you have everything you need for a jolly good time. I suppose you needn't have had the costumes, but the firm rented them all together, and it did add an air to the thing. They had me done up in this ridiculous evening gown, with pink ostrich feathers in my hair. I'll send you a picture if you want when I get my prints back.”

“Sounds like a gas, Mary,” their father said, tone dry as dust.

Will was in the act of covertly rolling his eyes when Mary suddenly turned to him and said, “You know, you really ought to have some sort of fancy ball at that manor. Why don't you? I know old Miss Greythorne always kept things spare at Christmas, because of her legs and all, but you don't have to keep doing things just as she always did. You could sell tickets. I bet it would be mad popular!”

Unexpectedly put on the spot, and not wanting to spoil his luck at having escaped detection for his sarcasms, Will blinked at his sisters. “It's not a bad idea,” he said at last. “I don't know about selling tickets, though, I'd think the locals would revolt. They're used to the manor putting on a Christmas party for them, not having to pay a fee to attend.”

Mr. Stanton offered, “Some sort of complimentary ticketing system? Sent out through the post, maybe, a certain number of tickets per household, within the village limits?”

“I didn't really mean for Christmas,” Mary said dismissively, tossing her glossy hair. “Some traditions are sacred. But,” she added, enthusiasm returning to her previous high, “you could do them other times of the year, rent out the manor for big groups and let them play out their kit for a weekend.”

The meal was ready and on the table, and Gwen went to fetch their mother and Bran to come and eat.

“I do think the idea of a Christmas festivity has some merit,” his father said to him. “What do you think, Bran, Alice?” he asked, bringing the rest of the now-seated group into the debate. “Mary suggested that Will try and spiff up the usual Huntercombe Manor Christmas this year. Would it cause a riot?”

“A large one, if it were any fun,” Alice said, answering promptly and decisively. “Everyone's starved for fun that time of year. We don't get the kind of glamour and glitz the city-dwellers have, and the young people need outlets of that kind very badly.”

“Christmas party is denominational,” Bran observed. “Anglican. Specific. Not culturally inclusive.”

“No,” Roger admitted, “but very traditional, here, and a big part of our community, and the community's history.”

“I _didn't_ suggest Will do a Christmas party in the first place,” Mary said, “because I know all that very well. I thought he should do it some other time of the year, and sell tickets.”

“Yes, all right,” Will said. He wished he did not feel so strongly that it would be wrong to use his powers as an Old One to escape this kind of awkward familial inquisition. They meant well, but …. 

If he'd been there alone, he might have done it, clouded their minds for the moment it would have taken to quietly slip away; but Bran was there, observing all, and he would not willfully bind him under any enchantment. What could not be escaped would have to be endured.

The touch of Bran's foot against his own under the table as they made their way through their pot roast with rutabagas was something of a solace, he admitted to himself internally.

When all was said and done, eaten and drunk, the night had worn on substantially, and grown bitterly, frosted cold.

“I don't want you walking home in this,” Alice fretted as the last dregs of their supper were tidied away and the kitchen restored to its usual order. “Won't you stay here tonight? Mary's sleeping in one of the second-floor bedrooms, but there's your attic free, Will, and I'll fish you out a cube heater to keep you warm if the skylight leaks in a chill.”

Bran smiled and accepted the invitation, so Will supposed that was all right.

The two of them said their goodnights to the Stantons, then headed up the stairs with linens, extra quilts and pillows, and the heater. They made the bed together, working in the wordless sort of harmony that often settled between them; and then they took it in turns to head downstairs again and clean their teeth.

Will had undressed and slipped into bed, waiting for Bran to come and join him. When Bran came in his shadow reached up around and behind him before he reached out to turn off the light switch beside the door, leaving only a small lamp on by the bedside.

In a single gesture Bran pulled off his shirt and sweater all together, letting them drop to the floor as he advanced on the bed, unfastening his belt buckle and trousers.

“Brave wizard,” he said, gentle and sweet, as he climbed naked and erect up over Will's body in the bed. “Doesn't run away from his friends and family. Thinks about changing the ways he does things.”

“Faint heart never won fair maiden.”

“I suppose I do deserve that 'fair,' though I draw the line at 'maiden' – I'll have you know, I lost my sexual innocency years ago.”

“And have I 'won' you?”

“You know you have.” 

That came with a sunny smile that made Will's heart catch in his chest; Bran looked so _happy_, like it went all the way through. 

“We've never made love here,” Bran observed, voice pitched low and intimate, grinding his erection against Will's belly. “Last year, when you were writing me those beautiful letters, I used to think about you in this room. I always imagined being here, when I thought about being with you.”

He shifted to pull the quilts back from Will's body as he spoke, baring him to the chill air. His pale hair gleamed in the soft lamplight as he slid Will's briefs down and off of him with the lightest of touches, coming to rest between Will's denuded legs.

“I mostly thought about you, when I slept here as a boy.” Will's breath hitched as Bran's fingers grazed his hips, his thighs, the sensitive curve of his buttocks.

“I … if I'd remembered you, maybe I would have done the same, I dunno. There was always a sort of formlessness to my fantasies, when I was younger; hands touching me, specific things, sex acts, not so much who as how.” 

He bent over Will's torso, dropping little kisses along his chest, his shoulders, down his flanks.

“I worry I put too much weight of fantasy on you, Bran. It is not your fault you were the first person … the first person like me I ever felt really understood by, all the way deep down. You shouldn't have to bear that pressure.”

“No more should you,” Bran answered. He lifted Will's legs up to rest them on his shoulders, then reached down a lazy hand to stroke his own hard cock, once, twice. “We are not ordinary people, to be free of burdens. That is all right. It is the price of being who we are, of being different. I would rather be different with you than the same as everyone else. Don't you feel the same way?”

“Yes,” Will said fervently. “Yes, you know I do. I fell in love with you, the first time, because you alone of all the beings in the world were different with me. I never could stop thinking of that, never could forget you because of it.”

One of Bran's hands was cupping his bottom, the broad index finger working him open while the palm held him close, Bran's wrist brushing against his balls making him moan aloud.

“I want to keep being different with you, lover of mine,” Bran said, breaching him then with the length of his cock, sliding deep, deep inside him. The position opened Will up so far for him that Will was almost overwhelmed by the completeness of the sensation. He tried to stay quiet as they fucked, not wanting to disturb any of the other people sleeping in the house; but for all that he could manage it all right in their bedroom at home on the farm, Will was afraid he'd failed that night in the goal.

The next morning, when he woke up, Will was alone in a tangle of quilts in his childhood bedroom, with only the remembered scent of Bran's body beside him to attest that the whole affair had not been a dream all together. After he'd dressed and made his way downstairs, his father told him that Bran had gone out at dawn with his mother to see to the animals on the farm; and that, in contrast to the early rising farmer types, Mary was still asleep.

In the window seat of the farmhouse's front room, Will was sitting still as a stone, apparently watching the frost form on the windowpanes as the temperature dropped; the spider-lines webbed out too slowly for human perception, but perhaps not for his Old One's eyes, that must see time differently than other men's. Or so Bran thought, watching him.

The weather had changed for good and all. The last plantings that could be put in place were in; the animals were settled into their winter routine in the barn. For the first time in months, Bran found himself able to stop and take stock, no longer heading forward at a dead rush under the pressure of the season's turn. Once the winter arrived, there would be nothing to do but wait it out, muck out the barn, tend the beasts, and draw up plans.

His days, which had been jam-packed, became longer, fuller. He had time to stop and watch the world again. By late afternoon, he was done with his chores, and ready for something else to do.

“I think,” Bran said, standing, suddenly fidgety, awkward and electric, “I'm going to head down to the Friendship Society meeting. If you don't mind.”

“Of course not. I can go with you, if you like.”

“Some other time, maybe. I ought to go by myself to start, I think.”

“I know that village society can seem impermeable, but you've worked your way through more layers than I ever could have expected over a few short months. Another year or two, and they'll be making you mayor, or postmaster.”

“I should hardly think so. Silly. What use would a Welshman have for an English village government seat?”

“I'm not going to bother addressing that, as I know you know – better than I! – about the various levers of power.”

“Yes, well, that is part of why I want to get in with these people. The Roberts kid has been on my mind. I'd really like to meet that father of his. So. Time for me to go press a few, and shake some hands. One of us should do, Old One, and I don't think it had better be you.”

“No.” Will gave an odd little laugh, shaking himself all over like a dog coming out of cold water.

Bran laughed back at him, and then said aloud, wonderingly, “Who would have thought, who'd ever met me as a kid, that I'd be the member of a relationship who was better with people on the whole?”

“I would,” Will said, not hesitating. “You were always like this, Bran. You just didn't quite know it, at first.”

He didn't know what to say to that. He bent down to plant a rough kiss on Will's mouth. “You stay here with the animals,” he managed. “I won't be late.”

The Friendship Society met in the town hall, down toward the center of the village. The building was damp and drafty in the changing weather, but as more people came in, many bringing trays or pots of hot food, the accumulated human warmth began to change the atmosphere of the space.

Bran cast a surveying eye over the room, men and women, old and young. More than two dozen, all together, but less than three. Some he recognized, some he did not. He saw Roger Stanton's friend Mr. Macdonald coming in at the door, and went over to meet him, grateful for the presence of a reliable companion.

“Hallo, sir, good to see you,” he said, shaking the older man's hand.

“Ah, young Mr. Davies. That's right, Roger said you'd been wanting to come by a meeting. Have you met my son Angus?”

From behind him, he produced a broad-faced, snub-nosed man who looked to be about Bran's age, thick-bodied in sweatpants and a nylon jacket. “Hi,” Angus said, and shook hands.

“Have you eaten? Let's go check out the potluck. Angus's mum sent us with a cornbread that we should drop off in the kitchen.”

As they sat down at one of the unfolded card tables on three of the unfolded metal chairs, paper plates and plastic cups clutched in their overfull hands, Angus said, “You're Will Stanton's friend, aren't you? The one who moved here, after they found him last winter.”

“The one who did the finding, or so I understand it,” his father put in.

Bran could feel himself flushing behind the concealing folds of his scarf. “I was here,” he said at last, trying for neutrality and some bare degree of truth. “I met him when we were kids, we recently reconnected. He was a good friend to me when I was a boy, was Will.”

“To me, too,” Angus said, taking a drink of his beer. “We ran about the village together when we were growing up here. Then, all of a sudden, it was like he was just gone. And different. He never did leave, not for long, settled down right here in Huntercombe same as the rest of us – but he doesn't come out much, for sure.”

Awkward, Bran offered, “He's been in better health, since he was found last year. Might have some interesting things going on at the manor later this season.” The food was all right, plain hearty salt-and-beans fare, edible and unexciting.

“And what about yourself, Mr. Davies? Or would you prefer just Bran? You're welcome to call me Mr. Macdonald; folk sometime do get a kick out of standing on ceremony.”

“Bran is fine, sir,” Bran answered. “I've been breaking my back getting the old Dawson farm into shape before winter, and not time for much else! Now the frost has come, I'm able to rest my bones and sharpen my reading skills.”

“It's a fine project you've taken on, restoring that farm,” the elder Macdonald affirmed.

“Well, it's partly about my recent helper I wanted to come by this evening. Young Phil Roberts has been coming by to give me a hand as a part of his probation, and I understand his father's a member of your society here. I wanted to meet him.”

“Well,” Mr. Macdonald said in a slow, careful voice, “Derry Roberts is sitting over there by the beer keg, so you're likely to get your wish.”

“Should I ask you to introduce me – or would I do better to go over on my own?”

“No, I'll introduce you to him, lad. Here, Angus, I'll be right back.”

Bran gathered up his rubbish and dropped it in the bin before following after Mr. Macdonald to where a half dozen people were arrayed in apparently heated conversation. As he drew nearer the group, he began to be able to pick up the thread of it – 

“...actually do need them, for the services sector, and the NHS,” a middle-aged man intoned.

“Is that true?” a woman asked. Not waiting for an answer, she went on, “They get a lot of free stuff, I know that. I'm an art teacher at the community annexe, and I see all kinds of … a lot of free stuff.”

“I don't see why,” a small, heavy-set man seemed to explode outward, “I don't see why a man should have to pay all this tax on what he leaves to his children, and meanwhile it all goes to whatever migrants want to show up.”

“That's true enough, Derry,” the officious man agreed.

“I don't want to sound prejudiced, or anything,” the woman fretted.

“No more you are, Liz,” the heavy-set man affirmed. “If we can't tell the truth among friends and neighbors, where can it be told? It'll be a sad day when innocent words like yours get cast as some sort of political incorrectness, punishable by shunning, banishment! A sad day indeed.”

Approaching the group in the lull that followed this solemn pronouncement, Mr. Macdonald cleared his throat. “Derry, hallo there,” he said. “I've a young man here wanted to make your acquaintance. Bran Davies, the new manager at the old Dawson farm. Bran, meet Derry Roberts.”

Bran extended a hand. “Good to meet you, sir,” he said. “I've been … working with … your son Phil.”

Mr. Roberts gave Bran an extended eyeing, up and down. Bran stood and let him, though it made him clench his teeth. Then the man stood, took Bran's outreached hand, and shook it. “Good to meet you, too,” he said. “Hope that boy of mine's not been giving you any trouble.”

“No, sir. He's proved a good hand with a shovel.”

“Well, I'm glad the matter's been dealt with,” Mr. Roberts said. “We have to teach our young people good values, that's what.”

“Values like inclusivity and generosity?” Bran offered with sly civility, impossible to gainsay without looking an ass.

Mr. Roberts harrumphed and looked down and away.

Across the room, an older woman stood up and started to call a meeting, the officers of the society assembling to proceed through the club's business. None of the people around Mr. Roberts moved to join them.

“I'm going to go listen in,” Bran said. “I just moved to this village, you know, and I'd like to find ways to be involved. Be seeing you gentlemen.”

He turned and made his way back to the table where Angus Macdonald was waiting for them, snacking desultorily. Mr. Macdonald followed in his wake. Bran's shoulders didn't relax and drop down from around his ears until they were safely seated again.

“Hoo,” Mr. Macdonald said, “you're a sharp one, my lad.”

“I've little patience with willful stupidity, that I'll admit,” Bran said.

“... D'you want to come out t'th'pub with us?” Angus asked him all in a rush. “It'll just be club's business for the next hour, and that's deadly dull.”

Bran blinked at him. “… I'd like that. Thanks. I don't want to miss out on anything important, though.”

“Go and talk to Vera, then. She's at the post office, and she can get you in to any business you've a mind for. Much more efficient than sitting through this mire. That's only worth doing if you have some cause you've a wish to promote, or a grievance you want mended. Pop by the post office tomorrow and ask Vera where you might be useful.” Mr. Macdonald inclined his head at the grey-haired woman who had called the meeting to order, and was presently involved in taking some sort of quorum vote.

“Yeah, all right, then. I can't stay too late, though I've got to get back to the farm, early morning tomorrow, you know how it is.”

“I do,” Macdonald said. “I'm a greengrocer, now, but I grew up on a big farm, and my brother still keeps it. I've taken Angus out there a few times, so that he can get a taste of the real old life.” He chuckled and ruffled his son's hair, until Angus laughingly ducked his head to shrug him off.

They left together, and proceeded to get so drunk that Bran made use of the taxi himself, to get himself safely home. He was still fair sozzled when he tipped down into his bed beside where Will had curled up drowsing.

Will stirred when he felt the contact. “How did it go? You were so late, I got sleepy.”

“Fine, fine. Went out with an old friend of yours. Angus Macdonald. Nice bloke. Some terrible old assholes in this village, you know that? Angus is all right, though. He asked after you. Why'd you stop being friends?”

Will had frozen at the sound of the name. “Angus Macdonald …. We were friends before. Before I knew who, and what, I was. I didn't know how to pick back up and be friends with him again, after. He would have asked me questions I couldn't answer.”

“Like what? I don't think – ”

“Like what I wanted to study in university, or what I wanted to be when I grew up, or who I wanted to date or marry. What would I have said? It seemed better to just … avoid the encounter.”

His head still spinning intoxicatedly, Bran reached out to stroke Will's hair, cheek, neck, shoulder. “To just let go of the friendship?” His voice came out plaintive, unexpectedly, and it was a moment before he understood why.

“Such things seemed necessary,” Will said, distant and sad. “Needed sacrifices. There was a war.”

“Not war now,” Bran mumbled, and, hand still buried in Will's hair, passed out into a state of immediate, deep, and dreamless sleep, the headache that would be waiting for him in the morning just starting to prickle up behind his eyes. He did not know if Will gave any answer to what he'd last said, or how long it had taken before his wizard returned to his rest.


	4. Chapter 4

Extending a cool, elegant hand from the now-icy late autumnal stream, Tamesis said languidly, “I want you to be my escort to the festivities at Samhain. You will oblige me in this little thing, won't you?”

“Oh?” Sometimes, Bran had found, the best thing to do when his aunt made these pronouncements was to spin for time and air, not immediately committing himself.

She seemed wise to his stratagem. Sweetly, she went on, “I didn't press you at Lammastide, or on the Equinox, because you were still but newly-arrived. Also because I wanted you to myself, at least for a little while. But now it is time for you to take your place among the powers of this place: spirits of stock and stone, great and little, tame and fierce. Everyone goes to this party, everyone. It's the event of the year. A perfect time and place for you to make your debut, little Pendragon, my dear sister-son.”

“What you're saying, aunt, is that you've enjoyed having me to yourself, and now you're ready to flaunt me before your mates. Or your enemies?”

“Well,” she said, not missing a beat – she never did – “you're very flauntable, dear. Have you ever thought about wearing facial hair? A full beard in that wonderful pale coloring of yours could be quite the arresting effect.”

“Mmm.”

“It could serve your agenda, as well as mine,” she wheedled. “The party, not a beard. Yes, I admit, I will enjoy showing you off, and may benefit politically from the connection; but you have yourself to establish entirely, and I can offer you an ideal opportunity to do so.”

“I don't think I have an agenda, aunt,” Bran said. “I came here for love, not power.”

“Mmmm,” she parroted back at him. “Well, if you chose to mope along the riverside here all by yourself like a small boy ill-done-by, you may do so and welcome. It will be amusing, in its way. You're just a prisoner in these lands, no self-determination at all. No care or concern for your future, not you – little captive. Had to take your lover's place! But I do not think you are as disinterested as you pretend, not even to yourself. Take the power anyway, and use it in what way you choose.”

He did not commit himself to the request that afternoon; and Tamesis threw a pouting glance after him as he left her, a clear reminder that she knew he knew he owed her an answer.

Later, in the chilly evening, Herne came to fetch him for the hunt. As they mounted up, Bran did his best to speak offhandedly when he told the huntsman, “Hey, my aunt wants me to go to her Halloween party with her. I haven't said yes, yet, but I think I should. I might not be able to ride out with you that night.”

Herne fixed him with a baleful golden gaze. “What?”

“Tamesis wants to introduce me to the faery courts, I guess. Maybe it'll be fun?”

“And that's what you're here to do, is it, to have fun?” The huntsman's voice was flat, gravelly. Bran felt his early argument thrown back at him, and reacted with frustration.

“I mean – I'm here to be with Will, and that's, well, not always _fun_, exactly, but … moreover I am in fact most literally here because I promised my time to her, not because of Will at all, or you, or any other reason.”

“What is it you think is happening in the world, Son of Arthur?” Herne asked. His voice cracked like the snap of black ice, the breaking of branches under the piled weight of snow, and Bran shivered. “Do you not see the hatred in the hearts of men here growing, forces that lead to chaos, cruelty, oppression, violence, death? We will have much work to do, that night. I had counted on having you at my side. Things will arise that you must learn.”

“Okay. Okay, I'll try to get away early. But I'm going to need to go, I'm sorry. She holds my binding, on Will's life and freedom. I can't gainsay that.”

“There is more to your charge than your lover's life – or your own. Don't you know we're at war?”

“No, I don't. You sound like Will – all this talk of wars! When did I sign up to be a soldier?”

“Not a soldier.” Herne made a rough, dismissive gesture. “We enlist none. You are a knight! Or at least – a guardian. A man of honor who rides a horse must keep to the code of chivalry. _Young Prince._”

“I gave that up,” Bran said, speaking flatly in his turn. “I gave that up when I was a little boy. So long ago, I don't even remember doing it.”

“You can't give up the core of yourself, no matter what positions you rise or fall to as a result of your choices in life,” the huntsman insisted. “You are who you are, Bran Davies, Bran Pendragon. To chose to do nothing – that, too, is a choice.”

Herne said no more on the matter that evening, but Bran found it impossible to put his words behind him, no matter how hard or fast he rode. Herne wasn't wrong; he remembered Robin and Soraya's grief and fear, and thought of the conversation he'd overheard at the Friendship Society meeting, and shuddered, not with any thought of cold.

It was late on Hallowe'en night – so late as to be early on All Saint's Day in the morning – when Will was jolted up out of his farmhouse bed. The wind was whipping around the building, through the treetops; and from the yard there was a sound of barking like the rushing of a river in flood. He couldn't think why, but his hairs were standing on end, every instinct he possessed screaming to him that a supernatural threat was drawn near.

Then he remembered – Bran had told him that he would be late, first with his aunt the river genius, and then, most likely, out with the hunt. Bran hadn't shaved for the last few days, and he'd looked delectable with pale stubble highlighting his cheekbones. They'd had trick-or-treaters by the farm earlier, and then Bran had gone out. 

Will put on his coat and boots and, pushing up his sleeves to bare the burned-in brand of the quartered circle of the Light he bore, carried now before him, he went out the farmhouse door, leaving Bercelet behind locked safe inside.

In the farmyard the white hounds of the Wild Hunt streamed and bayed like a current, cavorting among the outbuildings. In the center of them, standing alone, was Bran. 

It was like looking into the past – or into a now-impossible future. Bran was clad all in silvery silks, the faery finery close-cut around his legs and hips and loose-flowing around his chest and arms, and around his shoulders was wrapped a heavy fur. His face was stern, his jaw and upper lip shaded with a short, full pale beard. Taken together with the silks, it made him look elegant and eldritch, regal and strange. Herne was nowhere to be seen, but still Will had the urgent sense of something wild, something dangerous, something primal and uncontained. It was Bran, he realized, who was triggering his magical senses; Bran who, in that moment, looked every inch a Lord of the Wild Magic.

Bran turned to look at him, then, and their eyes met; and Bran's golden eyes were like liquid, like metal, like heat. The wind whipped harder around him for a moment, causing the silk of his garments to ripple and swirl, and his hair to flutter wildly aloft. 

“Bran,” Will said, and then again, more loudly, “Bran!” He coughed at the cold air piercing through his lungs. From inside the house, he could hear Bercelet yammering over the otherworldly din. 

The wind died abruptly, then, and in its absence Bran's hair and clothing settled. The strange light that had seemed to shine around him dulled. The hunting hounds were suddenly gone, vanished like fog in the rising daylight. Indeed, around them the dawn was now clearly impending, a paler grey shading the sky to the east.

Bran walked slowly up to the farmhouse door, approaching the place where Will stood rooted. “Phew,” he said. “I'm all in. Next time Herne invites me out hunting following a social engagement with my aunt, remind me not to do – at least some of all of that.”

“Bran,” Will said, “are you all right? You were – ”

“I know. I know. I don't know. I feel all right now. But – just now – I couldn't come in. It was like there was an enchantment holding me still, pinned down and waiting.”

“There was,” Will admitted, opening the front door to show the carvings along the jamb. “My enchantment. I told you, didn't I, last year, that I placed spells of protection on this house.” It wasn't a question. The sigil was a hexefus, combining the runes Isa and Gebo. Together, they worked to “freeze” the home, protecting the farmhouse both materially and spiritually. Will had carved the mark himself the previous spring, when the farm had been attacked by local troublemakers.

Bran reached out a hand to touch the doorframe, made to go in, then hung back. Bercelet ran out, then back in again, then came to twine about his master's silk-clad legs. Bran fingered the carved warding again. “I set it off?” he asked, sounding scared and unsure.

“Yes, I think so. Maybe it was the hunt?”

“It was me it was effecting, though. Just me. The horse is stabled in the barn,” he added, bringing a hand up to his eyes. “I am so tired, Will, and it has been such a long, long day.”

Will went to him where he stood in the doorway; he wasn't afraid, now that he knew it was just Bran, and no other threat. Bran was tense as an animal poised to spring. Will held up a gentling hand. “Come inside, now,” he invited, “and lie down in our bed with me. And, if you like, you can tell me about it.”

“Yes,” Bran said with a sigh, his shoulders slumping; and any residual tension Will was aware of drained completely away, as if it had never been. Will leaned in and kissed him, and Bran kissed him back, the new whiskers scratching pleasantly at Will's cheeks. His lips were cold, at first, although his tongue was hot.

Breaking the kiss, Will reached out to touch the short bristles. Bran almost jerked back from the touch at the last moment, but then held still to accept it. 

“If I thought you looked sexy with the stubble when you had your jeans and sweater on,” Will said, doing his best to keep the mood light, safe, familiar, “it's nothing to how well it suits you just now. Come on, come inside.”

First Bran went in through the door, then Will, then last of all the capering Bercelet, who was very excited by all of the late-night activity. The closing of the door hid the protective sigil from view; and as Will paused to pour Bran a glass of water, before following him up the stairs, he rolled down his sleeve, so that the mark of the Light on his arm might not show.

Then he went up to the bedroom, where Bran lay collapsed in a boneless heap on top of the quilt and coverlet. Setting the glass down on the nightstand, Will ran a wondering hand over Bran's shimmering garb – “Faery silk,” Bran said, “contributed for my use by my aunt. She didn't tell me about that beforehand. Thought I was dressed well enough when I showed up for our meeting; but she disabused me of that notion right quickly, had a funny little elf of a tailor towing along behind her to get me properly stitched in before we made our grand debut. I guess their styles are a bit different.” 

He held up one silk-bewinged arm, waving it once or twice to make the fabric flutter, before skinning out of his borrowed finery. “It's quite a look,” Will said, watching as the pale silk pooled around Bran's ankles, shifting on the floor as he kicked it clear. Underneath he was completely bare. 

Will gathered up the quilt and pushed it toward Bran, who snagged it and wrapped himself round with the soft bright warmth, not pausing in his recounting for more than a breath.

“There was a mask, too, but I wasn't permitted to keep it. After she'd dressed me over, Tamesis took my arm – she meant the 'escort' part literally – and whisked me off to a great faery mound. A big hollowed-out hill it was, standing up for the evening on a circle of pillars. And inside, there were … well, I spoke so cavalierly about that little elf tailor because he was far from the strangest creature I saw in the course of this night.

'She introduced me to a great number of strange people; some with crowns on their heads, some with stones growing out of their faces, some with no backs at all to them, like molded candy for the holidays. And spirits of all sorts, trees, hills, barrows, bogs …. Herne was there, glowering away, although I got the impression he only went so as to keep an eye on me, and make sure I was ready to ride by midnight. There was music, and dancing – and wine and food, but Tamesis wouldn't let me eat or drink, and I guess that's likely for the best, for if I'd had wine tonight on top of everything I think I'd be under our bed right now, and not on it.”

He reached out to Will, then, clutching at him, and scooted himself closer so that he was lying half-curled up in Will's lap. “I wish I could have taken you with me,” Bran said, pressing his newly-unshaven face into Will's thigh, “it would have helped to have you there. To manage them all, and to remember. But you would have hated it. Even more than you would have hated the Friendship Society meeting, I think.”

Will ran tender fingers through Bran's thistledown hair, all disarranged by the wind and the riding. “You've made it through the night,” he said. “You're home now.”

“Herne said some things to me the other day,” Bran muttered, still hiding his face. “I think I was wrong, Will. What I said to you before. I think I was wrong about there not being a war anymore now. Of course it isn't so. Your masters bought me a respite, a childhood, a dozen years or so, with their spell of forgetfulness, but now I know it once again. Not from Dark magics, or faery plots, but the evil that governs the hearts of other men.”

Will's own heart clenched in his chest. Should he tell Bran, that he'd just voiced an echo of the warning the great King of Britain, Lord of the Light, had given his only son, when first they'd met?

But no, Bran was distraught enough – Will wouldn't remind him of that, now, too, on top of everything else.

“What am I to do, _dewin_? How am I to fight this? Tamesis asks me to gather power, and Herne does, too – but to what end? How shall a man honorably wield such a thing?”

“Carefully,” Will answered him, continuing to reverently touch the so-bright hair, “and not alone. You're not ever alone, Bran. I'm right here beside you, as I was always meant to be. As my master was to your father, long ago.”

“You haven't wanted to come with me,” Bran said softly. “I haven't wanted to press you. But I need you beside me, Will, I do. To – to keep me rooted, to remind me who I am and what I came here for. If I had you at my side – I feel like we could do anything together, you and I. I'd like to try.”

“All right,” Will whispered, softer still. “I'm sorry I haven't been there for you better before. I suppose I may have been worried, a little bit, deep down inside, that you might not want to partner with me in that kind of way. When you came here, last summer, we'd intended at first to live and work more separately. And, just because we've ended up sleeping and eating and, and _living_ together, doesn't mean you'd want to entangle your literal fortunes with mine, as well. That you'd want to work beside me, or trust me with your fight.”

Will received no reply but a gentle snore; Bran had fallen asleep, wrapped up in the bright patchwork quilt and curled up like a puppy in Will's lap.

Will was working with an almost frenetic intensity on the ritual uses of masks. He needed to know about the sacred resonances of geometry. He'd made Aalia photocopy articles on solstice traditions around the world. 

“What's it all about?” Aalia said over the top of a heap of marked reference books.

“A project,” he answered. “Several projects. I'll tell you about it soon. Some of it.” He was tired, and his mind was moving quickly; he did not quite trust himself to orient himself for her properly in time, if he was to try to give voice to that which was in it. He barely knew what it was he was working on; guided half by insight and half by intuition, he still needed to assemble more pieces of the puzzle before he would understand what it was all for.

The big front doorbell chimed, interrupting their colloquy. Will and Aalia looked at each other, both questioning. “I'm not expecting anyone,” Will said. “Bran has a key, and wouldn't bother to ring. Shall we go and see what's up?”

Standing on the manor doorstep was a broad-shouldered, thick-bodied young man in a knitted cap and sweater. It was Angus Macdonald, friend of Will's childhood, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot as he waited. In his hands he clasped a three-ring binder stuffed with paper. Brilliant, Will thought internally. Just what I need: more paperwork. But he opened the door and welcomed Angus in.

“Hi, there. Glad to find you here. I came through a few years back, after it was reopened, but you weren't here then, I guess. It was your big brother Stephen who showed us around.”

“Stephen's doing great down in the Caribbean now, his family keeps him busy. I'm at Huntercombe most of the time anymore.”

“I met your friend Bran the other week at Friendship Society, did he tell you?”

“He did.”

“He's not here with you today?”

“He lives at the old Dawson farm. I live here. Angus, I should introduce my assistant Aalia. Aalia, Angus here is an old friend of mine. I'll talk to him, you go finish processing those references, and then you can go for the day, all right?”

Aalia nodded and retreated silently into the bowels of the great house, and Will, picking up the other man's awkwardness, did his best to follow the forms: show his visitor into the library, provide tea, and generally not make a mess of things. He felt overwhelmed; he'd been operating at full mental capacity before the interruption, and was struggling now to shift gears back to the social.

“I'll not bother you long,” Angus said. “Only, I've had these papers for a while, meaning to give them to you, and had never got round to it …. I was worried about you, last year, when they'd said you were vanished, and then you were back but we still never saw you about …. but your friend Bran said you'd been doing better, and I thought, maybe now would be an all right time, not an imposition.”

Raising his eyes to look at Will, he added, “Though I don't notice you look well, Stanton, not to speak of.”

“I'm all right,” Will said defensively. He wanted to, but did not, duck his head to hide behind the fall of his hair. “Just a seasonal cough, or something like that. Bran's right, I have been doing better.” He bit his tongue before adding, I owe him a lot; others didn't need to know all that.

“Well, anyway, I have these documents, see. I found them when I was doing some research on the early history of the village – you remember, we always used to go about looking at the old gravestones, trying to read the names of those founding citizens? So. And I think I've solved the mystery of Smith Lane!”

Will raised a politely inviting eyebrow. Angus sounded just like himself, he marveled; lower and gruffer in tone than he'd spoken as a boy, but the same honest enthusiasm for discovery rang in his voice now that Will remembered from their graveyard traipsing. He started to breathe more easily; once Angus' voice wasn't a stranger's, he didn't have to worry about it so keenly, and could allow himself to fall back into a degree of mentally exhausted abstraction.

“Don't you know about this business? I'd thought you would, all the restoration and whatnot I guess you've done with the manor here. No one knows why the road that goes round back is called Smith Lane, you see. Were some odd 'sociological' publications on the subject, back a hundred, hundred and fifty years or so. But what I've turned up is an old sketch of the manor and its grounds that shows and actual, honest-to-God smithy around by the back lane – and so of course the name must be literal, as simple as that!”

Will smiled, remembering: the sound of Wayland Smith's hammer ringing against the stone of the buildings as the six signs of the light were bound together with new-forged links of gold. “Yes,” he said, and then, clearing his throat, added, “that would make sense. Let me have a look at your evidence. I appreciate your bringing it to my attention, Angus, really I do.”

“You can keep the binder,” Angus said, making as if to stand. “I thought you might be interested in putting something together about the legend. For the place, like.”

“Yes,” Will said. “After Christmas, maybe. Do you think people would like coming to a fancier Christmas party here, if they didn't have to pay any extra?”

“Oh, I don't see why not. If you made them pay, you're right, that would be the difference. Are you thinking of anything in particular?”

“My assistant keeps asking me that same question,” Will said with a wry smile.

“Well, are you?”

“I don't know yet,” Will answered.

It was Angus's turn to raise an eyebrow. “Well, if you feel like it, you might tell me when you figure it out,” he said. “Would be great to catch up again sometime. I'm still in the same place, living in mum and dad's spare room, so you know my number. Talk to you later, Stanton! And – mind about your health, it's getting colder. I can see myself out.”

Aalia had left while they'd sat reminiscing together. Alone, Will let a respectable amount of time expire by turning through this new information trove, then got on with it: shuttering the great house, wrapping himself against the weather, locking the doors behind him and starting off down the lane for the farmhouse, where Bran would be waiting for him.


	5. Chapter 5

Hand-calligraphed invitations had gone out to Huntercombe village at large to attend a Christmas Masquerade Ball, to be held at the manor on Christmas Day. There were meant to be festivities on Christmas Eve for carolers, as well. Will and Aalia had written the bulk of them, with a final assist from Bran to get the last ones finished off.

News came through the Stantons that Stephen, the oldest of Will's many siblings, would be traveling home for the Christmas season. He hadn't been back to England for several years, and wrote that he did not expect to be able to bring his wife and children with him from Jamaica. The Stantons were visibly disappointed, but stalwart in their refusal to heap blame on their son. “He does what he can, Stephen,” Roger told Bran, when they shared Stephen's letter and plans. “He'll want to see Will, I'm sure. They always were close.”

“It will be good for Will to have his other trustee here, with all he's planning to do at the manor,” Alice put in. “A helping hand halves the load, and more.”

Yes, Bran thought but did not say, if it's really a helpful hand. He better trusted Aalia to have Will's back during his foray into the social realm; though the girl was every bit as quiet-tempered as Will himself, she was solid as a rock, and had given Will her firm commitment to her cause. Christmas wasn't her holiday, but Will was her mentor, and Bran thought she might do nearly anything rather than let him down. 

And, of course, Bran in no way meant for Will to be without all the help that he, himself, might give. Having fished the sorcerer up out of the river and delivered him back into the embrace of home, family, and village, Bran felt possessed of a certain responsibility, or investment, in the ongoing situation.

Will insisted on helping to get the attic bedroom ready for Stephen's arrival.

“When he first came home from the Navy, when I was just a little kid, I tried to give the room back to him,” Will told Bran with a laugh. “Now I can do it over again, for real this time.”

“Just for a few weeks,” Alice said. “He's not coming home forever, Will. He's got a wife and family to be getting back to. I do wish,” she added with a discontented sigh, “that he'd been able to bring the children. But – I'll take the visitors I can get, and try not to bemoan the all the beautiful babies I can't get my arms around as often as I'd like.”

Will finished tucking the coverlet over the corners of the bed, then sat down on it, putting a hand to his chest. He didn't cough, but he looked like he wanted to. Both Bran and Alice Stanton frowned at him, and he ducked his head to let his hair fall down over his face, hiding him from their sight.

As the year darkened and grew chill, the light draining away toward the nadir of midwinter, Will's health continued to weaken. The lungs that had seemed to be healing well grew raspy, filling up with fluid from repeated infections. The doctor who had come to replace Soraya, a no-nonsense white lady with steely grey hair worn in a neat bob, prescribed rounds of medication to fight off infection; but it lingered, and the overall condition of Will's respiration remained poor as the weeks carried them deeper into December. 

Aalia, sympathetic and concerned, recommended a remedy of her mother's, a honey elixir of boiled water with sage, mint, and thyme, reduced and then added to a mixture of brown cider vinegar and a generous quantity of honey. Will took the medicines and the sweet drinks without a murmur, but his condition did not noticeably improve.

Sometimes, when Bran checked, he could observe a bluish tinge around Will's lips and the beds of his nails. Increasingly Will avoided exertions that would take his full breath, even in bed, as he could be stricken with prolonged coughing fits.

“I don't like it,” Bran said, pacing the length of their bedroom at the farmhouse in the middle of the night, while Will wheezed and struggled for breath, propped up on a mountain of pillows in the bed with a hot water bottle, a flannel, and a cup of honey drink with added ginger and lemon. “You aren't getting better, and you ought to be.”

“It won't kill me,” Will said, sounding awful. “It can't. Don't worry so much. Take care of the things you need to, and don't mind about me. 

But of course that wasn't possible, not when Bran would hear his smothered coughs from across the manor when he came in to find him at his office, and catch him wheezing after climbing the stairs at the farmhouse before bed. 

“What's wrong with him?” he asked Tamesis, angrily, when next he saw her. “Why doesn't he heal?”

“What does it matter?” she answered. The river was beginning to be bordered with ice, conglomerating around the tips of dipping reeds and branches, and his aunt's wardrobe was skewing decidedly toward the silver as the weather changed. “He's told you himself that he cannot die.”

“I don't want him to suffer,” Bran said. “The human doctors can't seem to help him. I thought – maybe it has something to do with magic. It's left over from when you had him, you know, his sickness.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Well. Perhaps it was the contact with the Wild Magic that did the lasting harm; it is not native to your friend, who is a creature of the Light. Wild energy held him close last year, filling his lungs instead of river water. Perhaps his body remembers the transgression with renewed offense.” Casting a sharp, sideways look at Bran, she added, “You smell of Wild Magic yourself, sister-son of mine. You've been keeping company with the stag and his dogs.”

“I have,” Bran admitted. 

More and more of late, it was true. The hunt had ridden with increasing frequency since Halloween, Herne coming for him with his horse bridled and saddled most days in the evening, no matter where Bran went to sleep. His work hours had shifted later in the day, in compensation. There was no trouble in it; during the deep winter months, his tasks were planning, charting, grant-writing, and accounting, and as long as the work got done, it didn't matter what was the hour of its completion. 

Some nights it was patrol; others, Herne arrived with a target in mind. They pursued the arrogant, cruel, and prejudiced, and Bran never ceased to marvel at how sensitive the hounds could be at sniffing out the darkness of human hearts. In the dreams of the guilty, they left horrors and hauntings. Sometimes, Bran tried to urge strengthening dreams of protecting animal spirits into the minds of the ones that were clearly victims, the bruised women and the huddled children, the non-white families who felt pricks of fear at every unexpected knock at the door or package in the post.

As he rode to the hunt in such frequent repetition, the knowledge and practice he'd gained rapidly turned into solid habits and a decent sixth sense for the quarry and the hounds; nothing like Herne's uncanny bond to his pack, but a strong showing for a human man who'd never hunted, and rarely ridden, before that year. 

Herne's own knowledge base appeared to be absolutely fractal, encompassing the specialized terminology for hunting practice and paraphernalia used across Europe over the course of several centuries. When Bran asked him for an answer, it would often come with such a flood of historical detail that he would be overwhelmed, like reading one of Will's historical journals; you thought you were understanding the thing all right, and then all of a sudden you realized that it had gotten quite away from you, and you'd utterly lost the point.

“Well,” Tamesis said, interrupting the flow of his thought, “if you're exposing your wizard to that kind of wild energy every night, in bed while he sleeps and his defenses are all down, I shouldn't be surprised if it is causative. I still don't think you need worry too much. If he survived me in the first place, he'll survive a bit of a cough.”

The idea was horribly plausible. It went down like a cold pour of ice over his back. “No one told me that could be a problem,” he said, husky-voiced. That he could be transmitting this contagion to Will, continually weakening him –

“You never asked. If I told you everything I know that could be a problem, little sister-son, we would be here for a very long time. You would no longer be so young, when I had told you what I know. The river flows in just the one direction before it reaches the backwash of the tides. I answer when asked, but I don't offer.”

“Herne should have said, then.”

She waved a dismissing hand. “Like as not he did not know,” she said. “And, as well, your wizard friend is more than typically vulnerable. He was to me, at any rate. I couldn't have taken just anyone, you know. There is damage in him; it weakened him, and made him available.”

“From the Old Ones?”

“I don't know,” she said. “He never spoke to me, when he lay asleep in my arms last autumn, only reached out again and again in his dreams.”

When he got home, not so late in the evening but well after the last fading light of the day, Bran found Will still in bed, papers and books strewn haphazardly around him, Bercelet lying asleep on the braided rug beside him. 

Not bothering to undress, Bran bent down to kiss his lover, nudging him forward so that he could slide into the bed behind him, cradling Will between his knees. “What are you working on so hard, love?”

“Christmas plans for the Manor,” Will said, and then turned his face away to cough. The coughing jag extended, until he hung limply hunched over his heaving chest.

“You need to rest,” Bran said, feeling wretchedly helpless, rubbing gentle circles on Will's back, feeling the knobs of the bones of his spine. Will was still too thin, he thought. Not nearly as bad as he had been a year ago, but not improved enough, either.

“You know it won't make a difference,” Will told him. “Anyway, I really want to do this right, Bran. I feel I need to give something back to my community. I – I'm not always very good at being a friend, or a neighbor. I want to do better than I have done.”

“Part of doing better is knowing your own limits,” Bran growled. His temper flaring, he extracted himself from the warm nest of their bed. “I'm going to go start dinner,” he said, and stomped off downstairs. He had a cellar full of his own late-season root vegetables ready to chop and simmer for a soup. Vengefully, he meant to add several peppers. They'd be good for the wizard's sinuses.

He didn't tell Will about what Tamesis had said. Why make him worry? If she was right, there wasn't anything he'd be able to do about it. Bran was the one who needed to do better at not poisoning the people around him. With a guilty heart, he ended up only adding one of the peppers to the soup he made for Will, just enough for comforting spice.

Stephen Stanton, a stocky man in his late 40s towing only a canvas duffle for his luggage, arrived a week or so before Will's birthday, appearing unannounced at his parents' door with his single bag in hand and a broad grin on his tanned and bearded face.

“Well,” he said, as he entered to joyful exclamations, “I've got used to carting everyone else's things around, what with Caroline and the kids. A man learns to pack light!”

Over an unexpectedly expanded afternoon tea at the old vicarage, Bran watched the family reunion unfolding. Will was more animated, at first, than Bran had perhaps ever seen him, bursting with excitement at the presence of this beloved big brother, asking after Stephen's family and work in the tropics with ready interest and real engagement. But, as was his wont of late, Will's energy wore out quickly – and then he had to endure Stephen's attentions, as well as the usual mother-henning from his parents and partner, the poor lad.

“You should have told me he was still so sick,” Stephen said, speaking over Will's head as Will sipped his lemon-laden tea. “I'd have fought harder to get home sooner.”

“Well, son,” Roger said, voice slow and even, “if you must know, there's almost always something going on here while you're away. You might try coming home without waiting for express notice.”

Will, recovering his breath a little, waved a hand to regain his brother's attention. “Stephen, I've got something I want to talk to you about. It's about the Manor Trust. I – ”

“About this accelerated season you're putting yourself through this Christmas? It's all well conceived, Will, but remembering the schedules you've been sending me and looking at you now, I hope you've put on plenty of staff.”

“I have,” Will answered patiently, “but that's not what I was talking about. I got some papers a few weeks ago from an old friend, Angus Macdonald – ”

Bran cut in, “Oh, did he come by? I met him at a social club in the village, he seemed like a nice bloke.”

“He is nice. We used to be quite close when I was in primary school. Anyway, he's turned up this pile of documentation about the old smithy that used to abut the main building, all the way back in the 13th century. Six hundred years gone.”

Roger Stanton whistled.

Will went on at a rush, “You'll have to have a look at the papers, Stephen, when you've got the chance. I think we should put together a historic reconstruction project. We could employ a bunch of artisans and workers here in the village while construction was going on, and then – apprenticeships? Artists in residence? We could even, I'd been thinking, try doing something really holistic in partnership with Bran's farm.”

“It's very exciting, what Bran has in mind for the old Dawson farm,” Alice opined, as Stephen did not immediately respond to Will's pitch with voluble enthusiasm.. “I'd been thinking he should try and work out some professional partnerships with you, Gwen. You could go farm-to-table. For a price hike, of course.”

“I won't have much in regular season or bulk, not for a few years yet,” Bran cautioned.

“Oh, that's no problem, we can market products as limited-run, at a premium,” Gwen said with a smile.

“If it all tastes as delicious as the bits he's been making up into soups and egg pies for me, it'll sell a treat,” Will said loyally, meeting his brother's eye with a challenging look..

“This all sounds pretty ambitious, Will,” Stephen said. “Are you sure you're not biting off more than you can chew?”

“Well, I thought I'd try out this – as you put it, accelerated – Christmas season, and, if that doesn't kill me, I can probably continue to take more on. It's a bit rich of you, of all men, to speak against striving and ambition!”

“I'm not,” Stephen said, holding up his hands defensively. “I just … from the way mum and dad have been writing to me, I thought you were … healed, better, after that awful time last year. And instead you're gasping like a landed fish, and taking on a great pile of work that no one is asking you to do. I worry about you, baby brother.”

“I know you do,” Will said. “That doesn't mean I don't want to try.”

Later, Stephen stepped over to help Bran with the washing up. As the rest of the family finished cleaning and retired to the front room to trim the tree, Stephen said, “We haven't had a moment to speak, just the two of us, have we, Bran Davies?”

“No,” Bran said. “But, with all the siblings Will's got, I'm getting used to splitting my attention.”

“He's your lover? Not just a friend, or a – a roommate?”

None of the Stantons had ever asked him about that so directly, or so bluntly. It took Bran a moment to think if he should deny it, if he needed to lie. 

“Yes, we're together. Lovers,” he confirmed, and nervously watched as Stephen's jaw clenched. _Iesu Crist,_ he hoped that was the right answer for him to have given …. 

“I've talked to both mother and father about it, separately and together. They're convinced that there's no way you could have had anything to do with the way that Will disappeared last year. I'd wondered, you see. You must be aware that the timing seems somewhat suspicious.”

“I can't think why,” Bran said, letting his voice go very blank and innocent. “All I've done is re-kindle a relationship with an old friend, after a time of trial in his life, and find something new there now that we're both grown.”

“And get a neat start on a career, courtesy of my mother letting you know when to move – not to mention, basically financing you.”

“Your mother's not so old yet that she's lost her wits. I consulted with legal counsel before taking her up on the employment agreement, as well as with her old friend David Evans, who trained me up from boyhood, and can vouch for me.”

Stephen sighed, running a sudsy hand through his salt-and-pepper hair and then looking at it with dismay. “I'm sorry to be such an ass,” he said. “I do trust Uncle David. How're Rhys and the other boys?”

“Well, last I heard.”

“I'm afraid I'm going to be stealing Will away from you for a while. I'm going to need to go over the state of things at the Manor, and it'll likely take some days.”

“That's all right. Will's his own man; I just try to be there for him, and support him, as I can.”

Stephen looked at him more measuringly. Bran did his level best to bear up under the scrutiny. “Could be my suspicions were misplaced,” Stephen said at length. “Might be my kid brother's lucky enough to have you by.”

“I think he's more capable than you give him credit for,” Bran said, keeping his tone mild and unpressing.

“It's possible,” Stephen admitted. “It's also possible, though, that he's worse than you realize, because you're here all the time, and don't have the perspective granted by distance.”

And the worst of it was, Bran could not entirely find it in his heart to gainsay him. Something was going to have to change. But, if it was his very presence that was causing Will's renewed problems, could he bear to tear himself away from the little world they'd begun to build together? Or was it his selfishness that was the problem? 

Stephen might not have been wrong, Bran reflected as he and Will made their way back to the farmhouse under the wide and starry sky, to suspect him of causing harm. Wouldn't Tamesis agree with him, ultimately? If he could only dedicate himself to Will and Will alone, surrender his apprenticeship under Herne and leave the work of the Hunt, maybe then Will wouldn't continue to suffer, and everyone would be the better for it. Yet Bran remained reluctant to relinquish the found weapon in his crusade of the hunt and the hounds. So what, he worried, was the matter with him, that he would even hesitate to make such an obvious decision?


	6. Chapter 6

The frustration burning up Will's veins as he stomped across the Buckinghamshire landscape in the weak afternoon sun was not a spiritual emotion; not eldritch or otherworldly, not wise or rooted in ancient secrets. It was the stupid anger of a little boy running behind a much bigger one, never able to keep up.

Will had thought that, maybe, as they both became adults, things would change between Stephen and himself. Both still treasured the memories of an earlier time in their lives, when a baby Will had worshipped the ground an adolescent Stephen had walked upon. But for mortals time only moved in the one direction, and time's currents had carried them inexorably onward. So why did Stephen, more than any of his other brothers or sisters, persist in seeing him as a baby still?

And, Will thought, checking himself in his headlong rush, why did it bother him so? If anything, he should treasure it, this last vestige of his forever-lost childhood. He'd never get another chance to go back to it, after all, and he had many years of life left to live as an adult man. Indeed, he would still appear to be in middle age when Stephen was dead and buried. If there was anything he, Will Stanton, had enough of, it was time.

They'd spent the morning working together at the Manor on matters pertaining to the Huntercombe Trust, and at every turn Stephen had been patronizing, doubtful of Will's strength and capabilities, or both. Will had hoped to share his dreams for the Manor with his beloved oldest brother, to sketch for him the vision that was beginning to coalesce in his mind as he worked side by side with Bran to re-awaken his connection to this their chosen home. 

It hadn't come out that way at all.

If only it hadn't been for the stupid coughing, the lingering weakness, maybe things would have been different. If Will didn't appear so fragile, maybe Stephen would take him with some degree of seriousness. Will felt tired, so very tired, of being mistaken for fragile, and again his anger sparked up as he made his way down to the riverside.

It was time to follow this thing to its source, and see if it couldn't be dealt with.

She was there already at the landing, waiting for him, as if she'd anticipated his move long ago. “Well, hello there, little wizard,” she said, deep honey and velvet grace. “Are you ready to return to my bosom? Would you like to hide away from your troubles in the endless rush of my currents, the tug of my eddies? You know you're always welcome back, not the least for your pale lover's sake.”

“Greetings, lady,” he said, the first syllables he voiced coming out hoarse and garbled with the thickness in his throat. He coughed to clear it, and went on, “I am gratified that you have found your nephew as good a companion as I have always done.”

“Indeed, I think,” said she, “that I might owe you a favor, even, for returning him to me.”

“May I ask you, then, for a gift of information?”

“Is that's what's brought you to my door! What is it you want to know badly enough to come back to me for it, little wizard? For little do I dream you've missed me so dearly.”

“What is the weakness in me that causes this illness? I cough and cough – why can I not recover?”

She laughed like falling shells and silver bells. “What a pair you make!” she exclaimed at last. “Here you have gathered together all your courage to come to me – to spare him? – and all the while he has my answer to your question, and tells you not. Well. I told him that it was likely the renewed exposure to Wild Magic through his activity with the Huntsman that was causing the stress on your core. But, of course, if you were not put together with such significant fractures running through you, it would not matter. Another case of ironic luck, is it not?”

“Please, lady,” he said, “I cannot see myself as you see me. Can you tell me where the fracture is, and if it might be repaired?”

She laughed again, this time high and shrill and harsh. 

“Might be repaired!” she mimicked him scornfully. “Such a wizardly way of looking at it. What if you let yourself break open instead?”

“I fear I would no longer be able to help those I love.”

“If you remain fragmented, split off from yourself, you will almost certainly no longer be able to do so. I will grant you this boon: an explanation. But do listen and attend. I weary of repeating myself.

'As you are now, living as an Old One among humans, the very air you breathe carries the Wild Magic that is poisoning you. Your blood connection to the humans drains you. A wizard might tell you to withdraw to safer ground, avoid the flood. But, as you will remember, the lost child inside your heart, still wholly human, could lie for months in my embrace and take no harm. So, it cannot be the magic alone that is the problem.”

Slowly, Will nodded. “I see. Thank you, lady,” he said, and swept her a deep and heartfelt bow. “I am going to try to pass on the benefits of this insight to one we both hold dear. You will not regret having taken the time to instruct me in this.”

“See that I do not,” she said, sinking back into a pool like a woman settling into an easy chair. “This season has been pleasant, little wizard. Don't mess it up.”

The sun had set by the time he made it home. Bran, working in the kitchen, looked up as he came in the door. “You've been working late!” he said in greeting, and then put down his wooden spoon to pull Will in for a kiss. 

He'd kept the short beard, and the gentle scratch against Will's cheek was fast becoming a favorite sensation. His denims hugged his hips, giving Will convenient handles to loop his thumbs through, and his worn white short-sleeved undershirt smelled like him, wild and homelike both at once.

But they couldn't just stand there kissing all night.

“I was working,” Will said, pulling away, “and then I went down by the river to talk with the Thames. She told me you've been keeping secrets, Bran.”

“Oh,” Bran said, his cheery mood abruptly deflating.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“I didn't know how to. She said it was because of me that you were ill, and – I thought I should give it up, give up the hunt, but oh, Will, I can't. I don't know why I can't make myself, but I just can't. Always in my life I have borne the brunt of bullies, and now I have a tool to use to protect others from the same … I can't cast it away, not now, not yet.” His silvery head hung low with apparent shame. “Do you hate me for it?”

“My poor love,” Will said, laughing quietly, not at Bran, or even at himself, but only at the tangle the world made of their best intentions. “I could never hate you, Bran. But I don't know if you've fully understood. You should have talked to me about it, and you could have rested easier.”

Visibly pulling himself back together, Bran stood tall once more. “Let me cover the pot and bring this to a simmer,” he said, “and then will you come sit with me, and talk it over?”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Will said, and, giving his darling another kiss, left to shed his jacket and acquire more comfortable clothes himself.

They settled in the living room, each tucked up on either side of the sofa, mostly but not entirely not touching. Bran slipped a steaming mug of honey elixir into Will's hands, and Will took it with a grateful smile; he thought he was beginning to see a way to survive, and was buoyed up by his hope, but it had been a long a busy day, as well, and the anchor of his exhaustion was also tugging at his leg.

“I don't quite know how to begin,” he admitted.

“Tell me what I've misunderstood?”

“That you're the one who needs to change, in all of this. That's not you, it's me.”

“You?”

“I'm the one who needs to adapt. Who needs to – make choices. Commitments. Am I living here, part of this community, or am I an Old One, separate and apart? I think I can be both at once – in fact I'm sure of it, that's not the choice facing me. It's just – with nearly everyone, after my eleventh birthday, except for you, I was always pretending to be an illusion of myself.

'You see, I had to hide myself, as an Old One, from the adults around me, who still saw me as nothing more than an unremarkable little boy. And, in another way, I had to hide myself from my masters of the Light. I didn't see it that way at the time, but – they demanded that I be all Old One, and no little boy, when I was both of those things at once.

'That's what Tamesis told me. If I hadn't shed that little boy so completely, if I'd stayed rooted in my skin, I wouldn't be so vulnerable to human Wild Magic now. And that's the reason why I'm the one who needs to change, Bran, at least if I'm going to keep on trying to live like this, like a man, with a family and a lover and a community and a work.”

Bran drew in a long breath. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

“It was always different with you,” Will said, knowing his wistfulness was showing through in his voice but too stripped down by his confession to stop. “Because you always saw me as both. I never had to tell you my secrets, you always just knew. And then you forgot, and I didn't know what to do but go back into hiding. My masters of the Light, many of them, lived separate from the life of the world. The thing is, if I can have you back again – you're worth it, you're worth anything, Bran. I would endure far worse than this nagging cough to stay by your side. The thing is, that's what your aunt told me – that I don't have to.”

He might have kept rattling on indefinitely, spilling all of his innermost thoughts out into the warm dark air between them, but Bran shifted then to close the space, stopping Will's mouth with his own. 

His tongue slid against Will's lips, parting them before pressing inside. His intensity only increased as the kiss became more intimate, as if he found only more cause for hunger, not satisfaction, in its stimulation. He bore down with the weight of his torso, pressing Will back into the sofa cushions – until Will exerted himself, thrusting up with his hips and overbalancing them so that Bran, in turn, fell back against the sofa's other side, and Will could kneel above him with hands braced against his broad shoulders.

Reaching down, Will started working at Bran's denims, flicking open the button and zipper on the fly, pulling them down far enough to discover, to his delight, that no additional layer of underwear impeded his access to his boyfriend's cock.

Instead of reaching out to touch Bran's erection, though, he sat back for a moment on his heels, looking up to meet Bran's eyes and hold his golden gaze.

“I don't want you to leave off your Hunt, Bran Davies Pendragon. I want you to be every bit the warrior for justice and good that I know you can be. And I understand that you need the action, to keep from being swallowed by despair. I wouldn't ask you to leave it, my dear. I want to love you into more of yourself, not less, never less.”

“So then,” Bran said, his voice coming out deep and commanding, “don't you lessen yourself for me either, _dewin bach_. I take you for your full self, man and immortal all together. If you try to shut me out, Will, you should be prepared for me to come battering on your doors.”

They did not speak, then, though both was certain the other was aware, of the truth that their differing (im)mortality would separate them in the end, no matter how they responded to it in the present; for someday Bran would grow old and die, and pass on to what fate may await human spirits after death; but Will would not, continuing on the earth until he, too, was at last allowed to take the journey to the Summer Country and the green hills of his rest.

Instead: “I'll take you at your word,” Will panted, and, pulling his sweatpants down around his knees, thrust himself down on Bran's cock. He moved slowly, pressing inch by inch, until they were deeply connected, rooted in the immediate and heated biological imperatives of the living moment, focused in the lover's desire to please and be pleased in return. 

It was a sweet lovemaking, and Will kissed Bran through his orgasm, before coming messily all over Bran's undershirt in his turn.

“Your birthday, day after tomorrow,” Bran said as they lay twined together in happy languor. “Any special plans?”

“Tea at mum and dad's,” Will murmured, half-asleep in the afterglow, although it was far too early to head up to bed, and he knew he ought to wake up and do something with the evening.

“Do you want to invite Angus?”

“Not with Stephen here, I don't think,” Will said reflectively, coming back to some semblance of consciousness to contemplate the problem. “It's a good idea, though. The thing is, I handled things poorly with Stephen today; he's not been understanding any of what I say or mean, and I don't know how to get through to him. But I realize, now, too, that acting childish and sulky only makes the problem that much worse. If he needs me to prove myself, well, I can do that. If he can see that I can handle this, maybe he'll come around.”

“Don't bend too far, love.”

“I shan't. Don't you, then, either.”

“Fair enough, I won't. Shake on it? And then let's go get some supper.”

“Liver and bacon!” It had been several years since Will had asked for that particular meal for his birthday tea, but it was still as much of a favorite as it had ever been.

“That was Bran's idea,” Gwen said with a benevolent smile. “He brought the fixings by along with the farm-fresh Christmas ham he sourced for me.”

“Your mum said you liked liver,” Bran said, blushing. “And you've been sick. I thought you could use the nutrients.”

“The one argument that might actually shut up the nay-sayers,” Stephen said with a smile, punching Will's shoulder with faux-bright humor. “We'll all agree that you need feeding up, and your health strengthened.”

But Will, still smiling at Bran, couldn't much find it in his heart to care or be bothered about Stephen's babying. “We're meeting Angus Macdonald at the pub later,” he said, “so I expect I'll be glad for the extra fortification. Thank you, mum. You're the best. And you too, Bran.”

“It was no trouble,” Bran said. “I've been looking into ethical butcheries of various stripes in the area, for a partner with the farm, so I had a good source to hand.”

A cheery meal passed without further incident, dominated by Stephen's stories of his children's exploits in Jamaica, interspersed with Bran, Alice, and Gwen's technical, practical, and legalistic discussion of animal processing and the sale of cooked and uncooked meats. Will and his father were able to sit in peaceful silence, each smiling benignantly as the family's chatter swelled around them.

When the group had settled into a replete stillness, Will piped up, “Mum, is the big Carnival mask Stephen gave me for Christmas and my birthday, the year I turned eleven, still put away with all of the Christmas things here?”

“Oh, I think so, dear,” his mother answered. “Shall you need it?”

“Not pressingly,” Will reassured her, gesturing her not to stand up. “We can get it on Christmas Eve, when we trim the tree. I was just wondering if you knew for sure it was here.”

“I do think so, yes. We always put it away with the season's things, to preserve it as much as for any other reason! You were a young child for such a unique and potentially valuable art object as a gift, but with the benefit of hindsight it seems Stephen wasn't wrong to give it to you then; it's certainly survived the years, and better than many of your brothers' and sisters' things.”

“I think I've got a use for it, after all this time,” Will said. “A Christmas surprise, I won't say more.”

“Understood,” his mother said, laying a finger aside of her nose, and Will loved her with every particle of his being for it.

“We do, in fact, have a gift for you now, actually,” his father put in. “It being your birthday and all. Would you possibly like to open it?”

Carefully wrapped in spangled paper was the old print of the Romans at Caerleon, restored and reframed in a simple brushed metal style. “We wanted you to have something to hang at the farmhouse,” Roger said. “You have all that art at the Manor. And I know this picture was always special to you.”

Will looked at the familiar/unfamiliar image, remembering, and a lump rose to his throat. He hid his emotion in his mug of tea with lemon, to the added benefit of soothing the by-now-usual pain. “Thanks, dad, mum,” he said. “I love it. I've always loved it. I'll treasure it.”

“And from me,” Stephen added, leaning in to hand over a contribution. When Will tore open the packaging, he found a recent reference work on medieval English metalwork, and, on his brother's tanned face, a rueful smile.

Will raised an eyebrow. “I've been thinking about what you said the other day,” Stephen explained. “Your plans are worth developing, Will. I suppose I'm too used to being the big brother, trying to keep all my littler sibs from getting in trouble or making too much mess. Mostly for my own convenience, I admit. But it's a good thing for you to take risks, try things, stretch your skills. You have good instincts. In fact, I was wondering if it might not make sense to transfer the primary administrative responsibility into your hands alone, so that you can make these decisions more easily when I'm half the world away.”

“Oh,” Will said. “I hadn't expected … yes, I would like that. Although I hope you won't step away too much, Stephen. I've always relied on your input.”

“Of course not,” Stephen said. “Just giving you your head, letting you take the reins. However you want to properly cast that metaphor.”

“I'll take it,” Will said.

After a pleasant, if not particularly to Will's taste, few hours of celebration at the pub, he found himself increasingly struggling to stand up in his own turn. He hadn't been drinking much recently, and in spite of his mother's cooking he found his Scotch whiskey going right to his head. At least Angus' company was more interesting than stressful; he'd grown into a genuinely good-hearted, thoughtful young man with bluff and straightforward manners, and Will found it easy to enjoy his conversation without trying too hard to anticipate risks of complication, discovery, disaster, imminent need for erasure.

Still, when Bran slung an arm around his shoulder and announced, “Bed time for birthday boys,” eliciting a knowing snigger from Angus, Will was in no way disappointed to rise, gather together his outdoor things, and follow him out into the night.

He was weaving and swaying as they walked, he knew, but Bran wouldn't pay that mind, or hoard it up to tease him with too much later. It was good to feel so safe.

“I asked Gwen to pop in round the farm this evening, and have a look at everything,” Bran said, low and warm to Will's ears against the crisp backdrop of the midwinter night. “I think we should head round to the Manor. I've a birthday present to give you still, you know.”

Will blinked at him. “It wasn't the liver and bacon?”

“No, silly wizard.” Will blinked again, and Bran sighed, reaching out a gloved hand to cup Will's scarf-wrapped cheek. “We should get a car,” he said incongruously, after a long still silent moment, and Will laughed.

“Whatever for?”

“So we wouldn't have to walk? So you could rest, instead of traipsing about in the cold night air? Can't be good for those lungs.”

“Won't kill me,” Will said back in a casual singsong; but when they resumed the walk, he answered, more seriously, “We could do. I like walking, though. It makes me feel connected, rooted in this place and time. It's good to know where you are.”

“All right, then I won't call for the taxi tonight. Sooner or later, though, we'll be old men, and then it might seem silly for us to still be walking everywhere. Specially if one of us ends up with bad knees, eh? Or will you be immune to that sort of thing?”

“No, I don't expect so,” Will said with a little smile. “I knew an Old One, once, who was stricken with gout. Power to shape a man's mind, sidelined by foot pain … we are not so invulnerable as all that, after all. And he was a happy man, most of the time … had friends, a home where he belonged ….”

Supporting Will as he made his erratic way homeward, then on the night of his birthday, the solstice night – the one-year anniversary of Will's re-eruption into his life, and the change that had overcome everything in it – Bran thought that it was not possible to love him more. Will's life had been just as changed, in that impossible morning in the meres below the Thameshead, and Bran, in similar straits, could see in sharp relief at that moment how brave Will was being in the face of all of it: the changes, the new intimacy, the vulnerability, the uncertainty about the future. 

Many of the other Old Ones seemed to have chosen not to engage these human intensities, turning their faces toward what high mysteries Bran knew not. Maybe it would have been easier for Will to do the same. It was clear enough that it was for Bran's sake, in large part, that he had not – Bran's sake, and the Stantons'.

With a sudden shudder, Bran realized that the events of the previous winter might have had a very different outcome, if Will Stanton had been leaving his mortal life behind deliberately, instead of merely having fallen into a trap like the silly wizard he was. There would have been no early-hours call back to the Stanton house relaying the glad news, not if Will had really meant to do it.

“I'm gonna make you a home where you can belong,” he said, the darkness and Will's inebriation making it a little easier to speak aloud such naked truths. “Will. So you can stay with me.” Their hands were gloved, so he couldn't interlace their fingers; but he reached out to clasp Will's hand all the same.

“I would stay with you anyway,” Will husked through the dark. “No matter where we had to go.”

As they came within view of the walls that surrounded Huntercombe Manor, Bran's attention shifted forward, projecting into the near future: he would go in at the great doors with Will, and send him upstairs to bed with a kiss, and then fetch up the birthday present he'd got him. 

When he'd been looking into local butchers, he'd connected with a lovely eccentric chap who kept an apiary; Bran having mentioned that his partner had been having persistent breathing issues during the winter, the man had had no end to say of the benefits of honey, particularly local honey, for the sufferer. Apparently local honey was full of just the right pollens to make a person's body settle properly into its environs. Bran had bought Will a quart of the man's most recent harvest, and promised to reconnect in the spring, and very possibly taking on a start-up hive himself for the farm.

The honey was gorgeous stuff, thick and golden. He wanted to let Will lick it off his fingers – and other things. And do some licking in his turn. With the sybaritic big bed of the grand royal master chamber, they wouldn't have to worry over-much about minimizing sticky spots, and Bran planned on taking full advantage.

He was looking forward to it intensely – so intently, as a matter of fact, that he quite missed Will hanging back for a moment, speaking with a shadowed figure who stood mostly concealed by the dark branching fingers of the midwinter forest, before they passed on in through the wrought iron gates and up the drive.


	7. Chapter 7

As per their invitations, the local people of the village began to turn up at Huntercombe Manor at about four in the afternoon on Christmas Day, just as the weak winter sun was nearing the horizon.

They found Will waiting for them in the great entryway, costumed as a Roman scribe in a thick woolen tunic and heavy knit socks laced up his legs, with a heavy woolen cowl and mantle wrapped around his head and throat to stave off the midwinter chill. Beside him, Aalia was attired as a Phoenician trader in a gorgeous linen gown and headscarf, burnished jewelry adorning her face and wrists, a warm woolen cowl of her own over all in a deep purple tone making her cheeks look pink, her eyes and teeth pearly. 

He could have asked for no prettier companion to stand by his side while he waited for Bran to make his planned-for grand entrance.

(Will had asked Aalia, with some anxiety, in the weeks they'd spent preparing for the event, if she really didn't mind participating in a Christmas holiday party, and had sought to assure her that he could find other assistance if she preferred him to do so. She'd answered back that it was no trouble, she didn't mind working on Christian holidays, but she would like to take time off in Ramadan, if that would be all right – and that she wasn't going to take her headscarf off for any reason. With relief, Will had readily assented; he'd come to rely on the girl's steady sense and clever wits, and would in fact have missed her support in dealing with so social and public an event.)

“Welcome,” Will told each of the familiar faces as they came through the door. “Welcome, all! Merry Christmas, and a happy holiday!” He took time to reiterate the instructions that had been on the invitations: “You'll find racks of costumes in the front hall. Please choose anything you like. There's pamphlets telling you all about each of the pieces, and the parts of British history they represent. You can all go ahead and get changed – the rooms on the first level are open, if you need privacy. Reassemble back in the front hall when you're ready, and then we'll begin. We'll wait for everyone to be ready before we start.”

Later in the evening, other guests, strangers paying for tickets and costume rentals, would arrive; but for the first part of the celebration, the crowd was all made up of familiar faces Will had known all his life, streaming by one by one under the arched door. Through they came, the people of Huntercombe. Eventually, the number came to include each of Will's brothers and sisters, Mary and James, Gwen and Max, his in-laws and niblings, Robin and even Stephen with his grey hairs, until at last his mother and father passed through and went in. 

(“I've left your and father's costumes in my room,” he'd told his mother earlier, when, after the joyous tumult of Christmas morning, including an exchange of gifts among all the family and visitors, he'd stopped to pick up a last few items before departing from the old vicarage, “so you can step in there to dress.” The rest of the Stanton pack would have to catch as catch can with the rest of the crowd; they wouldn't all fit in Will's rooms, to begin with.)

At last Will and Aalia turned their attention inward into the front hall of the great house, where the assembled village stood: men, women, and children clad in a gaudy mix of the fashions of half a dozen centuries juxtaposed. For this moment they were all Old Ones together, witnessing a melange of overlapping periods and times. Will had wanted to make them think, these people of the land that was his home, to think of the long strange history of their island, and how rare and strange and wondrous it was, that they should have all come together to form a community in the first place.

“Everyone ready?” he asked the assembled crowd, to cheers and murmurs of assent. “Then take hands.”

At this cue, a hidden drum began to beat, slow, steady, rhythmic. Taking his mother's hand – she was dressed as an Elizabethan Titania, with his father in an Oberon costume made to match – he began the procession, leading the chain of celebrants out the door like a snake through the frosted grass.

They went, slowly enough to be comfortable for the elders and children in the chain, out into the grounds, down the drive toward where the bare branches of the trees loomed over the gate in the wall. There, a pair of figures, each more startling than the last, awaited them.

A lady stood framed amid the barren trees in wintery splendor, attired in a deep green-blue velvet gown, hung about with pale jewels and pearls, her hair swept up and restrained so as to somewhat mute the sheer force of her glory, masked in silver paillettes like fishes' scales – the goddess Tamesis, making a rare appearance among mortals as a special favor begged from her by an earnest nephew-in-law.

Beside her, a taller shape loomed; human-bodied, but the shape of the head was strange. A man's slender yet muscular and powerful body was clad in shimmering silver garments that fell from it in fairy-like silken flutters. Atop his broad shoulders sat the head of a stag, with branching racks of antlers soaring skyward. 

Through the eyes of the large carnival mask, golden eyes like those of a hawk could be seen gleaming through the dark.

“Hail,” the lady said.

“Waes hael,” Will replied, and then led his chain of mortals in a cheer: “Waes hael! Wassail! Wassail!”

Impromptu, someone in the crowd piped up then, starting to sing the ancient wassail carol in a fine, light tenor to the rhythm of the still-beating drums. Others joined in, and the song carried them along as Will reached out and connected the goddess's hand to his mother's, his hand to the goddess's. 

When he took Bran's leather-gloved extended hand in his other, a tingling shock seemed to pass through him, and in its wake an almost overpowering awareness of Bran's physical magnetism, unleashed as he presently was. Almost it was enough to make Will swoon; he felt his knees going weak. But then Bran in his mask grasped his arm more closely, and took up leadership of the line, drawing them in a long looping oval back to the great house that now blazed brightly through the full and velvety darkness of the Christmas night.

(Later, they would dance alone together in Will's bedroom, safe from any public vision; and still Bran's eyes had blazed through his mask until Will pulled it up and off, discarding it with care and yet still returning to his lover's mouth with ravenous urgency.)

Two days before the New Year, Will and Bran sat side by side on a train crossing the border from England over into Wales, a few days' luggage piled at their feet. 

It was very cold, but there had been no snow for several days. 

The sky was high and pale above them. The trip had been swift and smooth.

“I haven't been back to Wales since we were boys,” Will confessed, glancing sidelong to where Bran was comfortably ensconced against the window.

“No? I don't suppose you had much reason to.”

“I could have done, if I'd wanted. I have family in Clwyd as much as you, you know. All those cousins!But – I couldn't bear it, being so near to you, when, as it were, you were so very far away from me. You didn't remember, you see, didn't remember the secrets I'd shared with you or the trials we'd passed through together, or any of the things we'd been and done and seen.”

“I wonder if we'd have made friends again, if you'd ever come back,” Bran said musingly.

Will stiffened at what felt like an implied criticism. 

“I only mean – ” Bran soothed, putting up a hand, “that I think I would have liked you all over again, even without the ancient history. But I understand why you felt awkward.”

“Oh, I still feel awkward enough, trust me for that. Do you want to stay together, tonight? Or would it be better to split up? It's no trouble for me to stay with Aunt Jen, to give you some time with your father.”

It was Bran's turn to stiffen, and he bit his lip. “I don't know,” he said. “I don't want you to think – it's not that I love you any the less, Will, and it's not that I want to keep you as some kind of dirty secret, but – you know what my da's like, how conservative he can be … I'm sure he more than half suspects, but if I can keep from giving him an overt confirmation, we'll all be the easier for it. I feel a coward, though, to say so. I ought to stand by you.”

“You shouldn't,” Will sought to reassure him, reaching out to grasp Bran's arm in a gesture of apparent comradely support. “I do understand, Bran, really. Especially now, with these changes all so new in your lives. Reconnect with them, this time, and we can deal with the other things later, if we chose to. We don't have to do it all now.”

Visibly, Bran relaxed. “When did you get so wise?” he asked, pressing Will's arm in affectionate return.

“Well, I've had plenty of time, haven't I?”

The Evanses, Owen Davies, and John Rowlands all waited for them together on the Tywyn platform. 

“Came into town for a movie,” Jen Evans said, welcoming her nephew with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Wonderful to see you safe and sound, Will dear.”

“Hallo da,” Bran was saying simultaneously, accepting a hug from his father. “Good to see you, John. You remember my friend Will Stanton?”

“Of course,” Mr. Davies said, reaching out to shake Will's hand. “Thank you for escorting my wayward raven home again for a time.”

“No trouble at all,” Will said cheerfully. “I've been longing to see these valleys again ever since I visited your home as a boy. You live in the most beautiful part of Britain!”

“Aye, a lovely land,” John Rowlands added, shaking Will's hand in turn, then clapping Bran heartily on the back. “Although it has its secrets – as do we all.”

Will didn't see much of Bran for a night and a day after that, Bran having vanished into his father's cottage. Will himself spent the afternoon of New Year's Eve day pottering about the Evans' home, languishing in a happy haze of good food and family comforts. He'd been feeling better since Midwinter had passed, and while he was no longer weak and exhausted, he knew he still lingered with the lassitude of the recently ill. His Aunt Jen babied him just the way she had when he'd come to Wales to convalesce in his childhood, and he let her do it, not finding in himself the energy to repel the advances of her care.

Sitting looking out at the landscape revealed from the farmhouse, he found himself reflecting how changed it all was, since the Dark had made a fastness of these mountain valleys. His supernaturally attuned senses were strikingly aware of the difference; a lightening of the pressure the sky exerted against the land, a crawling tension that had absented itself.

But, when he spoke to his cousins, he heard another sort of story: funds drying up, towns withering away, whole employment systems collapsing under the weight of time and change, leaving ruin in their wake. “Bran is more typical than not,” they told him. “Everyone has to leave to find a good living.”

On New Year's Eve, the Evanses planned to host a large party, not only for their extended clan, with John and Owen with Bran in tow, but also the new hired man, Emin Varayev, and his young family. Will was pleased to note that Bran seemed to get on with the hired hand who had largely replaced him; when he sought out the pale flash of Bran's hair, he saw the two of them were deep in discussion. Technical, he was sure – points of livestock management and breeding that he himself would only just begin to follow.

Bran looked well, natural and at home; Will remembered him, years ago, standing awkwardly as a boy in the same position, in the same room, and smiled.

After a time, they found themselves alone together in an eddy of the gathering. 

“Hi, Will,” Bran said.

“Hi,” Will said. “How's it going?”

“Good, good,” Bran said. “He never changes, my father. Like the mountains he is, age-old. The pup he's raised for me is going to be a whopper when he's grown. We did remember to tell Paul we were bringing the dog, yes?”

“We did, he said it would be fine, stop worrying.”

“All right,” Bran said, “I will.” And, bending quickly, he stole a kiss before stepping back and departing with a smile. Will watched him go, feeling dazed; you got used to Bran when you were around him all of the time, but after a time apart the intensity of him was overwhelming.

The rich roll of John Rowlands' voice carried even over the noise of the party. “Almost midnight, friends,” he said. “Who shall make the first footing?”

“Not Bran,” he added, affectionately tousling his former protege's white-pale hair. “A dark-haired man, it should be, to let in the luck at the front of the house.”

“Will could do it,” Bran said, flashing a quicksilver smile. “He's got pretty dark-haired in his old age.”

“Excellent idea, Bran,” Will's aunt chimed in. “Where are your coat and boots, Will? You go out the back door, then come around and knock at the front as the hour strikes. We'll let you back in, and our luck, don't you fear.”

“Hmm,” John Rowlands acknowledged, seeming none too pleased by Bran's suggestion. All that evening, Will had not been able to help noticing the distinct chill in John's manner toward himself. Alas, it seemed that the deep-hearted man's friendship was permanently lost to him, a price paid for the Light's victory in hope and trust. Well, so it went; something must be given, so that the world as a whole could continue. And, with all he had been given in the last year of his life, was it not ridiculous to mind that one man was not his friend? Yet Will did regret the loss, and bitterly so. But so it was fated to be, for him, in this lifetime, at least.

“It's not so cold,” his aunt added, “or I'd keep you in by the fire and let one of the boys do it. But it would be an honor, would it not, John, to have a guest be the one to go.”

“It would,” John admitted judiciously. “It will do very well, Will, if you are willing.”

“As long as he bundles up first,” Bran repeated. “It's not so cold, but it's cold enough.”

“Certainly,” Will said, at last letting himself tentatively return Bran's smile.

“Time to hurry along, then,” Jen Evans said. “Here, there's a basket you should take; it ought to be … just … here it is, put away with the Christmas baking things. Ought to still be stocked with everything you need for the gift-giving! Off you go, Will.”

All alone in the dark winter night, Will hurried around the garden path to the front door, Aunt Jen's little basket swinging from his arm and tangling in his long scarf. When he made it all the way around, he rang the bell, then used the knocker to bang three portentous times on the door. Inside, he heard a clock chiming, again and again, striking the midnight hour.

David Evans opened the door, relieving him of his meagre burden. “Gifts of salt for seasoning, silver for wealth, coal for warmth, a match to kindle it with, and bread to eat. Come in, Will, and the New Year welcome with you.”

“Come in, man,” Bran echoed, standing beside him, “come in, and join in the toasting.”

And Will was only too happy to do so.

It was after nightfall when they got off at the station in London, Bran carrying the leashed but weary new Welsh sheepdog puppy in his arms, but that didn't matter so much in the city; for all was ablaze in a sea of light, the city still seeming bedecked for the holidays even though Twelfth Night was at hand and the Christmas season quickly drawing to its final conclusion. London wore her lights year-round, in traffic and advertisements, neon shop signs and street lamps.

As they'd traveled away from them earlier that afternoon, Bran had found himself keenly missing his mountains; but as they'd come closer to their destination, he'd felt increasingly comfortable sitting close by Will's side. 

London was nowhere near perfect, but the city had its upsides. 

As they emerged from the station to walk the few blocks to Paul's apartment, where they were crashing for the night, Bran took the opportunity to kiss his boyfriend without feeling paranoid. 

After a long moment, he drew back, shaken all over again with the depth and intensity of the well of passion that could open up between them, seemingly at any time. They'd mostly been warm and friendly with each other in Wales, save for a fantastic New Year's kiss, stolen behind a convenient door after they'd all had a good deal of champagne, and Bran had almost forgotten just how quickly their sparks could ignite and flare up into a great blaze when given half a chance.

The party was already in full swing as they arrived, light jazz wafting down into the street from Paul's open windows in defiance of the winter temperatures. When they reached the apartment they quickly understood why; with so many people there, the space was warm and close even in the cold weather.

“Will! Bran! You made it!” Barbara, her girlfriend Susannah in tow, embraced them enthusiastically in the entryway. “Come in, come in. Leave your coats in the pile here. Want a drink? Hungry?”

“Hi, Bar,” Will said meekly, submitting to big-sisterly mother-henning. “We'll just need to set up a few things for the dog, Paul should have put them out for us.”

“Good to see you, Barbara, Susannah,” Bran added, trailing along in Barbara's rapid wake. “Will, I'll tuck this little rascal into his kennel for the night, no worries.”

“You look better, baby brother,” Barbara said to Will as she handed him a glass of punch. “Not nearly so peaky as you were at Christmas. Aunt Jen feed you well?”

Their host swept in to welcome them then. Paul was beaming and pink-faced with pride and pleasure. “Jolly glad you both could come,” he said. “With Robin and Soraya here, and you, Will, and Bran, and Bar and Susannah, it almost feels like having the whole family all together. I don't think I've ever packed this many people into my flat!”

“Shouldn't have had so many siblings, if you wanted solitude,” his twin opined loudly from the other side of the living room to a chorus of cheery laughter.

“It really is lovely to have you, Will. We miss your tranquility, to anchor our frivolous little revel.”

“No frivolity in a joyous revel, Paul, nor in the music you make. These are the thing we live for.”

“Yes,” Paul said, clapping him on the shoulder, “that was exactly the sort of thing I meant.”

“So how's the farm going?” Robin asked, having made his way over to the newcomers. 

“It looks more and more like it used to, Robin, the way I remember it from when Old Mr. Dawson was still there. But – wilder, or it will be soon, I think. Bran's putting in the roots of his land-plan to grow deep, so deep that they'll outlast us.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” Robin said. 

“We've got a good steward staying on the property while we've been away,” Bran told him, coming up to re-join the group. “We took two weeks, all together, and were in Wales before we came here. But I absolutely trust Mahmoud to watch it all diligently, and keep things tracking along. Will found him for me – he's the older brother of his assistant, he lives locally with family, and so is more than happy for a space of his own for a spell. An excellent arrangement on all sides!”

“I want to come out and visit!” Susannah exclaimed, dropping down to sit beside the place where the brothers stood. “That sounds like the most lovely break I can imagine from bloody uni. I don't want to look at a library ever again, I swear to you. By the by, Bran, that silvery little beard is just smashing, a total look, you should absolutely keep it, at least through the end of the winter. Don't you agree, Will?”

“Quite,” Will said, looking over at Bran admiringly. “Well, Robin, how've you been, and the baby?”

“Excellent. Lainey's babbling, running around, getting into hellacious trouble. She's perfect and I couldn't be happier.”

“I guess you found that leaving home was the right thing to do, hm?”

“I wouldn't have thought it, Will, but it was. They'll make a Londoner of me yet. And you, Bran,” Robin asked, “tired of shoveling shit yet?”

“Stanton, I've got centuries of shit-shoveling in me yet,” Bran fired back. “It's doing well; I'm looking forward to seeing the transformation come the spring.”

Bran should have felt perfectly relaxed, here in this gathering of good and safe friends, sweet music on the warmed air, Will openly acknowledged and tranquilly happy by his side – but some slice of his senses remained on edge. He could not think why.

It didn't become clear to him until he heard a sound of hunting horns come cutting discordantly down through the atonal pitches of the jazz combo's set, a jangling aural confrontation between ancient and modern.

He stiffened, and turned to Will, drawing him back down the hall to where their coats hung by the flat's front door. “I hear the hunt,” he admitted in a low voice. “It's loud, this close to Windsor. It calls for me.”

Will produced an exceptionally human-looking pout, clearly evident even in the dim light of the hallway. “Must you go? I'd been looking forward to – spending this evening with you.”

“It's not that I haven't been doing the same, my love,” Bran tried to reassure him, picking up and pressing his hand. “But I'm called to this destiny, too. You know what that's like.”

Will sighed. “I do,” he admitted, sounding resigned. “I'll cover for you, then, and no fear. You have a key? You'll be able to get back into Paul's flat all right? I can make sure to leave a light on for you.”

“I'd appreciate it,” Bran said, and leaned in to show how much with a long kiss. “There'll be time for us yet, Will Stanton, that I promise you. When we go back home, after this, let's spend a few days alone together at our farm, make dinner, play with the dogs, fuck on every possible interior surface. Sound like a plan?”

“A good one,” Will agreed, unconsciously licking his lips, his blue eyes wide and dark. “And one I mean to hold you to, my lord.”

“Do,” Bran said, pressing his hand again, and then releasing it and heading out.

When he made it down to the street, still buttoning his jacket, he met Herne beneath a streetlight. The huntsman, in his horsebody shape, retained a human torso, and held the reins of Bran's own horse Sweet William in one of his human hands, and the great Caribbean carnival mask in the other. 

“Well met, Son of Arthur,” Herne said. “It is Twelfth Night! Time that the Wild Hunt should ride. Do you ride with us?”

“Huntsman, I will,” Bran said. “Only, answer me this – were you so easily able to steal past the safeguards on my home, to reach into my very stables?”

Herne appeared to smile. “For me,” he said, “it was no matter. The dog welcomed me; the man sleeping in the house did not hear me; the cat in the barn did not deign to take notice of me. As simple as that. For any other, your measures of protection would have sufficed. You need not fear gaps in your security.”

“That's mostly a relief, except for the part where it isn't. I suppose I have little hope, then, of ever managing to keep _you_ out?”

“You do not,” Herne said, smiling again in the gleaming electric light. “Now, come, Bran. Mount. Ride! There are fell deeds done in this world, men of evil action who sleep too soundly in their beds, children who hide in fear with no hope of defense or avenging. It is time, high time, that this island hear the belling of my hounds, the trumpet of my call, the thunder of our mounts' passing hooves. We will make such a ride this night as bards could sing of! Let us remind Britain of the power that backs and enforces the course of justice!”

As the huntsman declaimed, a broad smile broke and spread across Bran's face, not a pleasant look, he knew – a fierce grin, a baring of bright teeth. “All right, then,” he said, swinging up into the saddle and donning once more the heavy horned head. “Shall we ride, Sweet? I think we will have much to do, ere we sleep at the end of this night.”

And so it was; he was not mistaken, believing that the hours before dawn would contain many miles, many cries as the hounds picked up trails of scent, tracking malefactors across the south. But he could not imagine, in that sliver of the London evening, still little more than a naïve boy at heart, how far they would need to go to re-establish the course of righteousness – and not in distance alone.


	8. Chapter 8

Through the last hours of Twelfth Night and the early hours of the next morning, the Wild Hunt hounded evil-doers and abusers of power through the sky. It was all Sweet William could do to keep up with the course of the cavalcade. When, at last, Bran returned to London to stumble up to his assigned bed, Herne took the weary beast with him, promising to see to it that he was well and properly stabled at the old Dawson farm.

Bran snoozed against the windowpane as he and Will rode the train home to Huntercombe, heavy with lassitude after the sleepless night. It felt good, very good, to have been out, working with the hunt to make a difference in the wide world, but he was tired, and more than that, dearly wanted to spend his time and care closer to his own hearth.

Now the holiday was passed, Bran found it in his heart to hope that they could stay home together for a time, and that perhaps he would not hear the call of Herne's horn again right away. 

The light was on at the farmhouse when they arrived that night. Aalia's brother Mahmoud had kept the dog and cat, horse and sheep and goats, chickens and geese, with admirable care, and he was there, waiting for them, a fire lit on the hearth, to hand back Bran's keys.

Before the young man left, he stopped in the kitchen to take down a hanging lump of cloth, which he explained contained fresh cheese; a few of the goats were milking already. 

“You're not getting half the value out of your animals, if you don't make cheese,” Mahmoud said. “Sheep cheese, goat cheese, cow cheese, all are good, all easy. I will send you instructions on how to do it. Also, my mother and my aunt both want to know if you have buyers reserved for your new lambs this spring.”

“I'd appreciate it – and I haven't,” Bran told him, waiting with Mahmoud for his ride home.

“Well, you can probably sell all the animals you'll have this year, if you want to. Mother would be more than pleased to tell all of her friends about the opportunity. I've got a recipe for homemade yoghurt you should have, too. If mother can make it at home, in our flat, I'm sure you can manage beautifully here, with this fresh new milk.”

It was still fair early in the season to see the changes that Bran had left waiting in the soil, but as the months wore on, and the lambing season started to give way to the earliest whispers of spring, the animal life of the farm had clearly begun to take root and transform the place. 

Bran had started cooking more and more, eventually taking over the chore completely from Will, who had never been more than an indifferent cook. Given the impetus of working with the fruits of his own labors, Bran found a ready interest in the science of turning out a delicious dinner, and was on his way, he fancied, to being quite the experimental chef.

That night they had finished off a simple meal of chicken-in-a-pot, one of their own new fryers braised with seasonings and root vegetables in a cast-iron Dutch oven until it was so tender the meat fell away from their forks and they had to scoop it up with greasy fingers. 

Once the meal was done, Bran found it impossible to keep his hands off Will; groping the rounded curves of his bottom as he stood washing up at the sink, spinning him in for a wet, soggy kiss as he took the leftovers to the refrigerator. The bright pale wine they'd drunk might have had something to do with it; but more than that he was intoxicated with the feeling of settled domesticity, the deep belongingness that he and Will were building between and around them. He reached down to ostentatiously finger the seam of Will's trousers, grinning as he felt Will's cock twitch and grow erect at his touch.

“You're a ready one, aren't you?” he murmured, biting the soft flesh of Will's neck behind his left ear. Then he exhaled and stepped back. “Not yet,” he instructed. “Make a fire in the living room, and wait for me there. I won't be long.”

More than half erect himself, he let the dogs out for their evening run, watching them tear about in the chill clear starlight. The light spilling out from the warm farmhouse windows looked yellow and inviting in contrast. Bran called the dogs in and unlaced his boots by the door, before proceeding inwards.

Will was curled on the sheepskin rug before the crackling bright young yellow fire. He smiled when Bran came in, and drew him down for a cuddle, and Bran turned his attention in earnest to enjoying the delights of his wizard's mortal form. 

He really had been looking much better since the holidays, his face less gaunt, fuller and younger-looking. His body was increasingly solid and real-seeming under his clothes. Out of them, too, or so Bran was bent. The metal fasteners of Will's belt and trousers were warm, almost hot, from proximity to the grate.

“We've been doing all right, haven't we, you and I?” Will's question sounded funny and plaintive, and Bran pulled back enough that he could see that familiar, solemn face.

“Of course we have,” Bran answered him. “Better than all right, I think. You've put on flesh, and there's color in those cheeks … keep feeding you our good food, grown right here in your home soil, and you'll be strong and stout.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too, Will. What's all this about?”

“I suppose it's only … when I feel so happy with you, like this, I keep feeling I'm back asleep, dreaming it all.”

“Not dreaming, Old One,” Bran said, shifting back in close to grip Will tightly by the nape of his neck, Will's longish hair brushing over the sensitive skin of his wrists. “You ought to be happy.”

“I am, you know. More than I thought would ever be possible, a few years ago.”

“Let me see you,” Bran husked, returning to his former task of pulling up the hem of Will's shirt and jumper to expose his pale belly, and tugging the wizard's trousers and pants down to pool around his crooked knees. “My darling.” 

He pressed kisses along the curve of Will's hips, and then ventured lower. Bran licked a line along Will's thickening length, and pulled back to watch in frank enjoyment as Will moaned and bucked, his limbs encumbered and tangled with his half-off clothes. 

“Now I've caught you proper,” he whispered, teasing.

“You have indeed,” Will chuckled, then whined, “Bran, you're too much more dressed than I am, it's not fair. You've got to take off your shirt, at least.”

“All right, you can have – my shirt. That's all for now. Should have asked for more, _dewin_.”

Bare now to the waist, Bran grabbed Will by the hips, flipping him over to rest splayed on his knees, rump elevated and ready, knees still held together by his bunched-up trousers. 

“Take off your trousers, then. At least as far off as mine are, to be perfectly equitable.”

“Equitable, indeed,” Bran agreed, unfastening his belt buckle and unzipping his flies. His boxers joined his trousers in a pool around his knees, exposing a straining erection.

“Must I ask you to fuck me, then, Bran, or do you have plans of your own?” Will's voice, rather snippy and authoritative when he began, cut off with an undignified squeak as Bran's tongue swirled around his tight opening. “Dear lord!”he ejaculated.

Bran only paused for a moment in his ministrations to whisper, “Yes, I am,” before returning to his ministrations.

He listened as Will began to come undone. He watched Will's hands fisting into the hearthrug, red and then bloodless with the intensity of his response. 

“Grow here together – ” Will panted, as Bran's tongue thrust home, “like a – a garden – !” He was still convulsing with the aftershocks of his orgasm when Bran entered him from behind, driving him further into his almost unbearably sensitized condition. The sounds he made as Bran pumped his prostate, inarticulate and nearly wrecked, were enough to bring Bran rapidly to fullness.

They lay drowsing together, cooling and sticky, on the floor by the fireside, not moving for their bed until the coals had fallen in and turned to ashes.

Will had meant to walk Aalia home earlier in the evening, when the light was still good, but they'd really gotten going that afternoon in their work on the diagrams of the medieval smithy at Huntercombe manor, working out how the old land had lain in relation to the new. They were starting to get results back in from the geophysical survey he'd commissioned for the grounds that spring, and puzzling them back together with the old accounts and documents that Angus had unearthed was nothing if not absorbing.

The sun didn't set as early as it had in the deep winter, but the spring was yet young enough that darkness still came full early, before supper time and long before bed.

He should have taken greater care to keep his charge from being out after dark, he knew, he knew. But – in the end it would not have helped. When he and Aalia arrived on foot, there was already a fire burning hungrily in the front courtyard before Aalia's building's door, the glass of which hung broken and jagged, gleaming in the light of the flames. 

The hooligans were waiting for them. Indeed, they appeared to have already been there for some time. 

Aalia's weren't the only family who lived in the block of council flats. Many other families who worked in the village and the surrounding farms, lacking the material privileges that Will and his family enjoyed, were tenants there. 

The situation was serious; multiple lives stood at risk, and the wellbeing of an entire segment of the community.

Aalia broke from Will's side, running forward. “Mother! Baba! Teta! Mahmoud!” she cried as she ran. 

Before she could reach her goal and cut herself to shreds on the exposed glass, Will strode after her and grasped her, gently but firmly, by the shoulders, absorbing her forward momentum, not letting her get any nearer to the danger than he already had. “Stop, Aalia. Wait. I'm going to help them. You need to stay here, stay safe. Let the grown-ups handle this.”

She was older, of course, than he and Bran had been, when the fate of the world had rested on their shoulders – but she was just a child, all the same, and Will's heart ached fiercely for a moment for the children they'd all been, himself and Bran and the Drews, so young to be pressed into war.

He couldn't let that happen to Aalia. He had to do better than his masters had done. He was going to have to stop hiding and act. Slowly, deliberately, he raised his right hand, fingers stiffly outstretched in a gesture of command. 

As Aalia watched in silence, the crackling of the flames began to change. Still they wavered, but as though seen through glass or water; and as she kept observing she saw that their color was changing, and the damage to the building was retreating. It was as if time itself were recoiling around Will's hand, the fire collapsing back into itself as it became smaller, younger, newer.

But no less rapacious. When Will dropped his hand, he called back, “Aalia, run get help! Have them phone the fire station!”

Bercelet the wolfhound came pelting up out of nowhere to circle them, barking enthusiastically. As Aalia retreated away from the scene, she thought she heard his barks resonating, refracting, becoming the belling of a hundred hounds in cavalcade. She didn't turn back before sprinting off toward Mrs. Simpson's house, where she was sure to be able to use the phone.

The next day, the fire at the council flats was the chief topic of discussion across Huntercombe. Bran listened with half an ear as Vera at the post office tsked over the damage that had been done before the fire trucks had arrived. “Thank goodness for your Will,” she said, “and that little girl being so prompt getting everyone out safe. Just think! They all could have been burned in their beds.”

And nearly had been. When Bran had arrived at the scene, drawn to the edge of town by the frantic barking of his preternaturally perceptive dog, it was to see Will standing with Aalia positioned behind him, reaching out to the growing flames. From his perspective, he'd thought to see Will catch alight himself at any second. 

Then, heart in his mouth, he'd realized that the fire was pulling back from his lover's hand, as if unwilling or unable to touch him at all. A sphere of clear, clean air protected Will, and Aalia behind him, from the heat and the ash that swirled, threatening, all around them. 

When Will moved forward into the building, driving the fire before him, the air around Aalia remained breathable and pure. Bran couldn't see Will, once he'd passed within the doorway. He called aloud, then, high and strange, to summon his hounds.

Will had pressed ahead, steady as an angel band approaching, and Bran had run after him as swiftly as ever had his dogs, surging forward through the space between them to catch him up. He should not go into the fire alone, not if Bran had any say in the matter.

As Bran and the hounds of the Wild Hunt descended upon the scene in a rush of rescuing wrath, they found the culprits crouched over their just-lit and sputtering homemade Molotov cocktails, getting ready to pitch them into the building's foyer and run.

Phil Robertson had been a member of the motley group of teens, and Bran's human heart had wept and raged to see it; but he knew his hawk's face didn't show the emotion he felt. The fellowship he'd offered to the boy in the autumn hadn't been enough, after all, to cancel out the temptations of bullying about with the local youth. The ugly sense of entitlement that cloaked them, white English boys all, was abhorrent to him; in his present form, almost a smell that displeased his sensitive nose and tongue.

He hadn't realized that horns had sprouted from his head, or feathers lined his throat, until Will looked back at him with widening eyes, and he became aware of the differences in his own body.

“The fire department will be here soon,” Will said, loudly enough to carry to all present. “These hounds will hold you until you can be arrested. I am going into the house, to prevent any loss of life in this ugly business.”

He met Bran's eyes, and his face tightened in something like a smile. “It is good we were here today,” he added, “or else you might have succeeded in your intent – to your own loss and irreparable harm.”

“Harm enough is done already,” Bran growled. Almost he did not recognize his own voice, so deep and harsh did it sound through the heavy air; but he felt his lips moving, and the words were certainly his own. “Harm enough, and more than. What difference to their souls, that you and I happened to prevent them in their despicable aims? They are no less damned, for all that. Expect to hear the hounds at your heels, you little hellions, until such a time as you have truly repented and made restitution to those you've wronged!”

“No!” Will's hand was outflung in a gesture of prevention. “Don't curse them. Lord of the Hunt. May they have your mercy. I intercede.”

“The arm of the law is ready to clap them close, whatever,” Bran tossed off, drawling and careless. “What happens in their dreams – that, I fear, results from their actions, and their thoughts. If they wish to find peace, let them relinquish hatred and supremacism. I tell you, they would rest the easier for it.”

They could hear the wail of a fire engine approaching.

“_Baba!!_ Aalia was screaming, red-faced and ragged-voiced, as if the names of her loved ones were being dragged from her with a hook, as she came pelting back down the lane, staggering with weariness but still trying, shambolically, to run. 

The unbroken front doors of the building opened from within. Aalia's father was one of the men who pressed and held them open, and Will walked through at the hindmost of the line of all the residents, Aalia's elderly grandmother solicitously supported on his arm.


	9. Chapter 9

While the conflict had been engaged, Bran had felt himself to be less than human, or perhaps more –for certain different, not himself at all. Now that the danger was over, things seemed very different from the way they had just moments ago. Instead of being wild, free and powerful, Bran felt small, and somewhat shaky, and a little sick. 

Beside him, standing off to the side of the site of potential disaster with his hands in his pockets and his head handing low, Will looked no better.

“It had to be done, Will,” Bran told his despondent companion.

“I hate having to use brute power like that,” Will said softly. “It always feels wrong.”

“To me, too,” Bran admitted. “But it would be worse, I think, to do nothing.”

“You did what you could to stop it.”

In the half an hour that had transpired since the arrival of the local authorities on the scene, things had not visibly returned to normal; indeed, the mess looked worse now than ever, although it was better, far better, than it might have been.

Will's magic had radically reversed the fire damage to the building, leaving the structure mostly unscathed. However, more than enough evidence of an arson attempt remained for any doubt as to the local boys' guilt; far too much for them to escape punishment.

“Are you ever afraid?” Bran turned, then, to ask Will. “Afraid that someone might see, and realize what you are, and turn on you?”

“I could make them forget it, if they did,” Will replied, still looking sick and shaken. “My masters didn't leave me here in mortal danger, Bran. I'm at no real risk from human violence, or human prurience. Only my heart, which feels the bruises, I do admit.”

“Your heart is risk enough.”

“Well, then. It's no more harmed in this than yours. Phil Roberts, Bran.”

“I know,” Bran said heavily. “I saw. Well, Aalia's connections will be more than glad to have the pay I can give them, to do the work I was planning to have him help with. I won't have the boy back on the farm, Will, not with what he's done here tonight.”

“He had a birthday recently; I think he's too old, now, to to sentenced as a minor. That's a pity.”

“Is that my problem?”

“Perhaps not. Still – he's not an adult, either, not like his father is. You know it's his father's poison he's pickled in.”

“So when can I start to hold him accountable, exactly? If you hadn't been here, Aalia could be alone in the world right now. You don't think they deserve harsh punishment?”

“I don't know,” Will answered. “I don't know if it would help. Are we to be their executioners? Is that all that the power is for?”

“Will,” Bran asked, biting his lip as a new fear struck him, “you look pale, unwell. My aunt – the river said that it was my wild magic, that was making you ill over the winter, as a result of your previous exposure. Back there, I was – I _changed_ – have I hurt you, once again?”

“I don't know,” Will said, still sounding vague and sad. “I don't think so, Bran. I don't feel well, at the moment; but it might just be heart-sickness, truly, and nothing to do with magic at all. My lungs feel clear enough. Maybe I've changed, too. Maybe your changing is different than it was. Maybe we've grown closer, and that inoculates me from … the power you're discovering. I don't know. But you shouldn't feel afraid of that, of hurting me again in that way.”

“I don't know how I feel about it,” Bran admitted. “This – this becoming.”

Will considered a moment, and then said, “I think that's fair. I don't know how I feel about being an Old One, even after all this time; and certainly I wasn't sure at first, when the change was newer to me. We come into these powers so suddenly, and one wants to do good with them, but all the same it's not very comfortable, is it?”

Impulsively, he reached out to clasp Bran's hand, for all that they were technically in public, at the edge of the still-unfolding crime scene. “I am so glad I have you with me now. It's better, much better, to be like you, if no one else. I hope I can help you feel the same way. You should know that it's all right, for you to become whatever being you are. You'll always have my support.”

Bran let out a shuddering sigh, and some of the tension dropped from his shoulders, his pale head hanging lower as weariness took him over.

Will pressed on: “I'm so much stronger now than I was, because of you, and your love for me. If I'm able to stand firm by your side and not take injury, believe me, that's your doing, one way or another. We're going to keep finding ways to get through, my liege, trust me in this.”

They let go their grip after a moment, but still stood together, watching. After an extended period of disruption, the scene around the council building was starting to clear up: the young culprits taken into custody, the residents reassured of the safety of their homes by the fire department. Neighbors were turning up with covered pans and dishes, replenishing disrupted suppers, Will's sister Gwen amongst them. 

Will was loath to leave Aalia's family behind for the night, however; and later, Bran rode out to stand guard with weary Sweet William and his hounds. So nearly, so terribly nearly, had they escaped worse destruction, and loss of life. It didn't bear thinking on.

But Will couldn't stop thinking of it, in the days and weeks that followed the fire, and the tragedy-that-almost-was. The human lives around him were so regularly threatened by violence, rising from within the seeming sanctuary of their home community to tear and claw. Even that night, alone in their farmhouse bedroom, where he'd looped strings of myrrh and hung dried acacia above the bed to avert evil intentions and provide mental clarity, Will remained troubled by uncomfortable thoughts and emotions.

He didn't like the feeling of passively bearing these tensions and rents, the harm and hurt of people's daily survival. He didn't want to take the easy way out and make himself feel distanced from it, either, as Merriman had done before him. With all the knowledge and power he had, and Bran, there must be something they could do to salve and heal at least the life of their village, if nothing larger. 

It seemed to him, as he turned the problem over and over in his mind, that it was more than old names out of legends, secret and arcane powers, that they had in their hands together. For between the manor and the farm they might find many points of reciprocal function; together, they could run a sort of working life in the village that would be whole, unfractured, that could be kept transparent and open to the community. That could be a great good thing, a system that could very nearly support, hold, and enrich itself. 

They ought to talk about it, he thought, if they could keep from getting distracted by other things.

The distractions weren't so much carnal, as they entered the full swell of spring, as they were practical. With the old Dawson farm waking up again, wild and free and not yet tamed to Bran's will and purpose, there was much to do.

Will spoke of the problem with Bran while Bran and his hired hands delivered the last of the spring's lambs; while Bran worked with Aalia's brothers and cousins to prepare their fields for a new year's crop; while they pruned the hedges and trees to encourage new growth and deposited young seeds in the loosened earth; while Bran with his own hands placed the arc of new trees, arranged in the old order of the Druid's Zodiac, with the rowan located closest to the house, where it would one day reach up to touch the windows of the master bedroom; and while the great beehives beside the as-yet-unflowering orchards were filled with the buzzing and activity of their newly-transplanted insect inhabitants, all making ready assiduously for the coming summer.

At the same time, Will was moving forward himself with his plans for the reconstruction and restoration of the smithy at Huntercombe. Having secured his permits, he could begin hiring contractors and workmen to start the clearing and initial construction. Being an Old One was convenient, he had to admit, for the expedition of forms and paperwork related to historic buildings and preservation; he knew just the right things to put down to get his documents to glide through the wheels of British bureaucracy unhindered and unrestrained. Truth told, he found that bit of his present work to be great fun.

“So, on the one hand,” Will said, as he and Bran sat down to a dish of quiche with spring greens for supper, “we have people who lack access to housing; and then, people who have homes that are overcrowded, and need privacy and workspace; and then there's the young people, who could really use more to do, and more ladders up and out of the daily grind. We help the ones like Aalia learn some local history, and the ones who need places to stay or work to do can take rooms in the outbuildings here at the farm, or at the manor.”

Bran grunted a grudging affirmative, but then asked, rather pointedly, Will thought, “What about bad actors, like Phil? I'd like to be able to keep helping with juvenile detention programs, god knows some of those kids don't deserve their rap sheets, Vera's been telling me, but I won't have budding Nazis taking root here on the premises.”

Bran had struck up a friendship with Vera at the post office, who, it turned out, was a font of knowledge about the various social programs and needs intersecting in the body of the village.

“I don't know, exactly,” Will admitted, less than happy to be pressed on a sore spot. “We'll have to separate them from other, more vulnerable, people, that's for certain. I'd like to still offer some help, even for less-than-desirable unfortunates. Even hardened hearts.”

“If the thing could be run as an entire system, the way you're describing, we might manage something. Mind, I'm still not thrilled about the idea of dealing with little fashy bastards like those fucking vandals. I don't want their kind here. You handle the recidivists, if you've a mind to let your heart bleed fruitlessly for others.”

“I will, then,” Will said, looking down at the crossed-circle scar that was mostly hidden by the cuffs of his shirt. Looking up once more, he added, more lightly, “Do you know, I think we may need to find ourselves a name for this venture. This is the sort of thing that Max would say needs _branding_ – and he'd be right. Everyone knows Huntercombe Manor, but we can't just say 'the farm,' if we're going to try and market this, to the public or to the government with a grant.”

“Hmm,” Bran hummed after a moment, and Will made a questioning noise in response. “I hadn't realized before. The name of your village, it comes from the Welsh, I think. Isn't that a funny coincidence. Well, I suppose Britain has always been multilingual and multiethnic, hasn't it now. You English spell the thing 'combe,' anymore, but listen to how it's said. It would have been _cwm yr helwyr_, the valley of the hunter, originally, as is only proper.”

His and halfway to raising up his glass of wine to his lips, Will froze, his breath catching in his throat. “'The valley of the hunter'? Bran – ” he broke off, gesturing helplessly.

“I know,” Bran said. “After all, this is where the Wild Hunt comes home for supper; or at least, some of its members. Me, at any rate. The valley of the hunter.”

Recovering himself somewhat, Will pressed the advantage: “We could use that, I should think, as a name for this network we've been describing. Or base something on it.”

“Yes,” Bran agreed. “So. What if we called this 'farm and smithy system' Hunter's Cwm? It has one benefit, at least: once people understand that 'w' is a vowel in Welsh, they'll get on much better. Stop laughing, Will. Once you've grasped the phonetics, it's really quite an easy language.”

“So you've told me,” Will said, still chortling with private remembrance. Where had the sting gone, that the memory was his alone, when once it had been shared? “Hunter's Cwm. I like it.”

“That's settled, then,” Bran said. “I'm going to go out and feed the animals, close up for the night.”

“I'll do the washing up,” Will volunteered. It was only fair; Bran had made the quiche.

They would have plenty of time, he thought, going forward, to make new memories.


	10. Chapter 10

As the year turned around its first completed revolution since Bran had come to Buckinghamshire, the world of Huntercombe seemed to open around them like a flower, spiraling out from the potent cores of the newly-established Hunter’s Cwm.

The spring had borne completed paperwork, as well as produce from the farm, and Will and Bran had found themselves at the center of an increasingly powerful political lobby in the village. Partnerships with youth groups, advocates for the incarcerated and impoverished, the village church’s Benevolent Society, and other similar community enrichment interests had grown and flourished under Bran's stern yet inspiring golden-hued gaze. 

Will turned out to be unexpectedly good at wrangling the groups of people who were beginning to find needed resources and refuge through the network. He could communicate effectively with all sorts, oddballs and teenagers, passionate political advocates, village advocates and subculture leaders alike; sitting quietly with them, his longish straight hair always handing in his eyes, with Aalia often at his side, he elicited more openness than many of his interlocutors had given to another person in years.

“I never would have thought,” Gwen teased him, coming by one evening with a load of prepared food trays to donate to the Manor store, and picking up her bags of fresh produce, dairy, meat, and eggs on her way out, “that our Will would have ended up being such a people person.”

“Oh? I'm not surprised,” Bran replied with an arched eyebrow and a sardonic air. “He's always been good at getting close to people, neighbors or strangers, for as long as I've known him.”

“You didn't see him a few years ago,” Gwen shot back. “You were lucky to pry him out of his rooms, much less get him to speak with anyone outside of the immediate family.”

“Things change,” Bran said, spreading his palms wide with a cats-cream smile. “And sometimes, people just need to remember who they are.”

The scene at Huntercombe Manor was one of great labor and renewal. Excavation and construction teams, using historically accurate styles and techniques to recreate the ancient outbuildings, had given way to hired gardeners and landscapers. The old, rundown mid-century brick garage had been removed, the dilapidated gardens dug up, and Smith’s Gate once more stood erect between the great house's tall tudor chimneys and gabled roofs, and the run of the road away toward the village, surrounded by a scattering of other small medieval-period outbuildings. 

Some of these would be used for historical recreations, as living museums; while Will planned to let out others to visiting artists, and use others to house local folk in need. There would be space, peace, knowledge, work; community, again, under the gaze of the portraits of the departed Old Ones.

Aalia, after researching the insurance rates for community nonprofits, had given up entirely on the idea of a poisoner's garden. Instead, she and Will had encircled the grounds with a double-arcing line of trees, a mirror of the Druid's Zodiac that rounded Hunter's Valley Farm. Only saplings yet, but in time the carefully planted trees would soar skyward. 

Birch, the Achiever; Rowan, the Thinker; Ash, the Enchanter; Alder, the Trailblazer; Willow, the Observer; Hawthorn, the Illusionist; Oak, the Stabilizer; Holly, the Ruler; Hazel, the Knower; Vine, the Equalizer; Ivy, the Survivor; Reed, the Inquisitor; and Elder, the Seeker, all stood new-grown sentinel in their mirroring loops around the whole of the Hunter’s Cwm compound. They were one of the connections and protections binding the dual hearts of this young realm, the Manor and the Farm, as they hung suspended along the Old Way, Huntercombe Lane, like twinned green and glinting gems in the early Buckinghamshire summer, there beside the slow-winding course of the river Thames.

Today, the smithy fires were hot once more, for the first time in six centuries. In the low-roofed building of the reconstructed smithy, the red-white fire burned hot beside the oak and anvil; and beside it, Roger Stanton was creating a delicate golden bracelet, the tiny chiming taps of his jeweler's hammer ringing out like high bells.

“This really is splendid, Stanton,” Angus Macdonald said to Will, as they stood in the doorway observing the scene. A group of kids from the village had trooped in to the building, there to watch Roger's demonstration, and hear about the larger restoration of their local history.

“The first gold in Britain,” Roger was telling them, “was extracted and worked in the early Bronze Age. Believe it or not, these little islands were a major hub in the prehistoric global gold trade. All over the world, they used gold for the most important, purest objects. Because, you see, gold is one of the only things in the natural world that doesn't naturally change from its base state. Gold won't rust or tarnish; it holds its same weight without diminution, for as long as you can imagine.”

“Yes,” Will answered, “it's grand. Thank you,” he added, turning to his old friend, “for providing the information we needed, to get this off the ground. I owe you a debt, Angus, nearly as large as the one I owe to Bran. It's a blessed man whose friends bring him word of what he's lost.”

The young orchard Bran had planted had begun, at last, to bloom. He’d gloried in the ripeness of the buds, exulting in the promise they bore of petals and pollen and fruit, honey and full hives. He felt wizardly, himself, watching the land shake off its dreaming and wake into the deeper vitality of a living, working system, plants and insects and birds and beasts all contributing to the enrichment of the farm's ecology.

The young trees were blooming, and ground cover, fungi, bulbs and root vegetables were all taking possession of their respective ecological niches. The sheep and geese functioned as natural weeders and fertilizers, and the hens snapped up all of the garden pests that they left behind. The animals gave them byproducts, milk and eggs and meat to sell, transforming the landscape into food fit for kings. What had been a mere promise and a hope, in the autumn before, was becoming realized before his very eyes.

If it was so good and green and bursting, so soon and early, how great would it become in five years, ten, twenty? It was all Bran could do not to rub his palms together in his thriving fields and gloat.

“You're very pleased with yourself, I can tell,” his father said over the line, one night when Bran had phoned home to Wales. “You'd do best to remember that the earth can be a harsh master. What seems thriving may one day be blighted, if you don't keep close watch.”

“I will, da,” Bran said, “have no fear of it! The Welsh mountains taught me well, for many years. Now, Will had something he particularly wanted to ask you about, and so I am going to let you speak to him, and leave the room for a tick.”

Will had blushed and stammered, asking to speak to Owen, and Bran very much wanted to know what it was all about. But better, he knew, to keep his nose well clear of wizards' plans. He'd find out soon enough – when Will wanted him to, that was.

Bran's beard and hair looked silver in the moonlight, brighter and more radiant than the whites of their bedlinens as he lay back against the pillows of their farmhouse bed. In that moment, Will knew he'd never seen anything lovelier, and perhaps never would again.

“Are you waiting for me to grow old, wizard, before you work in me?”

“No,” Will said, “just savoring the moment.” And then he was moving slowly, slowly, shifting his hips so that his erection pushed deeper into Bran's slick passage, tilting to nudge his prostate and then rocking against it over and over, speed increasing.

Bran bore it heroically for a long time, holding Will's gaze firm and steady, but eventually under that onslaught of pleasure even his strong will began to crumble, and his eyes rolled back, and blinked closed, dazed and swept away.

“There, my darling,” Will husked, as Bran convulsed between his legs with his orgasm, “best be careful what you wish for.” He could feel, it seemed to him, every tremor of Bran's long, fine, powerful body beneath him, every shiver of sensual fulfillment and carnal satisfaction, his own pleasure mirrored and doubled back upon him. “My lord,” he breathed, worshipping, “my king,” and then he was coming, too.

As dawn broke over the farm, approaching later now than it had done at the bygone peak of the summer, Bran stood beside Alice Stanton, looking out over their investment. 

“Well, ma'am,” he said, turning to his sponsor-cum-mother-in-law, “how do you like your year's worth?”

“A good year,” she answered, clapping him on the shoulder and smiling up at his white-crowned face. “I hope, the first of many good years to come. Happy birthday, Bran.”

The harp that Will had had made for him, delivered from Wales as a birthday gift by recommendation of Owen Davies, was a far finer piece of craftsmanship than the upright harp that Bran had left behind at the Evans farm. This one was gilded, carved, and painted, climbing vines and blossoms adorning the framework. The strings, Bran realized when he laid his hands along them, were traditionally made, animal tissues stretched and treated, to produce the sweetest possible of sounds.

“My goodness,” Alice said, when he brought her in to see it, and share in his birthday breakfast, “that's quite an instrument. You'll have to give us a concert!”

“It would be my pleasure,” Bran said graciously. “Maybe I'll even be able to convince this one – ” indicating Will with a jerk of his head – “to accompany me; I hear he has a nice enough singing voice, and some knowledge of music.”

“You honor me,” Will said. “Yes, I will. Of course. But I won't half be able to match you.”

The waxing moon set over the lands of Hunter's Cwm in a haze of trailing glory, wisps of cloud following her down to her sub-horizon bed. Bran stepped out the door at Hunter's Valley Farm, and felt the hairs on his arm rise on end. 

His dogs came, unbidden, to stand beside him; but the warding magics on the door and house stayed dormant. The greening land held and drained away the Wild Magics of the Hunt, keeping them all protected, safe and sound.

Herne the Hunter, horns stark against the moonlight, descended along a moonlit trail of vapor, seeming to Bran's eyes to be surrounded by something pale and luminous as moonglow. As they drew closer, he saw that the light came from the shining coat of the white horse that rode in pace beside Herne's own great deer-like body.

“Well met, Son of Arthur,” Herne said, inclining his great horned head. “In my own turn, I, now, have brought you a gift.”

The horse turned out to be bound with a bridle as fine as hammered gold. Putting the reins into Bran's hand, Herne told him, “Her name is Llamrei, and I have brought her from the mountains beyond the moon to be your steed. She is no ordinary creature; in this time, and in others, still she will return to you.”

“Llamrei,” Bran breathed, reaching up to touch the pale forehead, the milky mane, of the mare. 

“She is full young yet, only just broken to bit and bridle by the ladies of the Isle of Apples. Your task it will be to train her up, to teach her to ride and hunt. We will need her cleverness and goodwill, Bran, so look you do so well.”

“I will,” Bran said solemnly, looking up at the great lord of the Wild Magic in something like awe; only for a moment, and then his accustomed self-assurance was back. “Well, Sweet William will be glad enough for the rest! I fear I've quite worn him out, this year.”

“Indeed,” Herne assented, with something not entirely unlike a smile. “It takes a great deal of work to build a kingdom.” And then he was gone, vanished into the spangled, shifting sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so we leave them, with wealth, work, and love, all full to hand. After this, expect both a bit of a hiatus – I've got some other current WIPs that are gonna take focus for a bit – and a time skip. 
> 
> This is one of the potential stopping points for this series as a whole, the first Happily Ever After. But things also are to keep on going.
> 
> I've deliberately stayed light on the issue of immortality in these fics so far, acknowledging the issue of differing life expectancies but not letting that become a primary driver of the plot or the emotional landscape. I wanted to write a more normal happy ending for Will and Bran first, to fully shed the sorrow of the bittersweet canon ending point before getting into all of that. When they're both so young, neither even 30, it needn't matter yet.
> 
> In the next story I have planned, though, tentatively titled “The sort of beauty that's called human,” set after another 25 years or so have gone by, those problems of death, mortality, and the lack thereof become much more pronounced and central. I have an ultimate solution/endgame in mind; but it does, necessarily, grow more and more bittersweet again from here, and stranger, and change and torque further away from – and then again closer back to – the book canon.
> 
> That's why I wanted to cut this part off into its own separate romance; and, if you want to mentally leave our lovers here, happy and young together, still safe in the good years of the late 20th century, I wouldn't blame you. Still, I do think the twists and turns I have planned are interesting, and worth a look! I hope y'all'll agree.


End file.
